Remote Work Management: High Performers Systems Revealed

Effective team management is a challenging task on any day. However, remote work management can raise the bar to epic proportions. So, while understanding how things work in the traditional office space is undoubtedly good, what you need more than anything else is a surefire way of enhancing your virtual leadership skills.

From mastering optimal time management for remote managers to understanding the process of hiring and onboarding remote employees and developing efficient ways of managing remote work conflict, there’s a lot you’ve got to catch up on.

But you don’t have to be too worried about that! Speaking from my 8+ of remote work experience, I’ll share the ins and outs of professional secrets that worked for me in managing cross-cultural remote teams over the years.

I’m not going to lie. It’s not easy but if you like a fair share of challenge in your remote career and want to be the best at management, this is a sign for you to embrace some remote work challenges.

Remote Work Management – What Every Leader Needs To Know

People will always be people. This fact is immutable whether you’re dealing with them in person or over virtual space. When you consider that alone, the need to add virtual people management skills to your repertoire doesn’t seem all that urgent.

However, every good leader understands the importance of taking stock of surrounding situations when engaging their team.

This means that, whether you like it or not, how you address Tom from Sales in person has to be different from how you handle them via Zoom meetings. That is if you want to keep remote work productivity levels as high as possible.

If optimal remote work management is to be achieved, you can’t afford to act on assumptions alone. Because the vast majority of your team is flying solo, so to speak, you need to run a virtual tight ship.

Why Invest In Remote Work Management

Managers who have yet to transition to remote work might wonder if it’s right for their business. There are several things you have to carefully consider on that front.

Here are the most pertinent elements.

It Leads To Increased Productivity

Done right, the ability of remote work to significantly boost productivity is simply unique. As far back as 2013, Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom and the CEO of Trip.com Group, James Liang, conducted an experiment that showed conclusively that remote work dramatically enhances productivity.

The most important thing to using remote work to increase productivity is to get the setup right. Once you can do that, you’ll be able to get more out of your employees at less cost.

It Saves Time

The average employee spends about 70 minutes on the road each day. However, remote workers don’t have to be anywhere to complete their jobs, so they naturally divert this time to complete their assigned tasks.

Bloom and Liang found that, in addition to saving a considerable amount of time on the road, remote work also contributed to workers taking fewer days off sick, having shorter lunch breaks, and putting in more work per minute.

Remote work can significantly enhance employees’ time efficiency.

It Saves Costs

Taking remote work seriously and investing in remote team collaboration and project management tools can significantly impact your bottom line.

You won’t have to spend so much on rent and facilities like furnishing. Similarly, you’re likely to get reduced cleaning bills and record a lower incidence of employee turnover and absenteeism.

And, since your employees will work under climes they consider most favorable, their productivity will increase. This means that, on the whole, your business will be able to spend less while making more.

So, you now know a few merits of shifting to an off-site-based work model.

Moving forward, you need to understand that these dividends are not automatic. On the contrary, the ability to produce the above result depends on how well you can leverage variables like effective remote team communication strategies, remote team performance metrics, and your virtual leadership skills.

See all that goes into successfully managing cross-cultural remote teams below!

The Ultimate Guide To Enhancing Your Remote Team Performance Metrics

When hiring and onboarding remote employees, every manager hopes to be able to get the best out of them. But this is only possible when you:

1.    Source The Right Tech

You can get away with it if you use subpar communication facilitates to engage your team in the traditional workspace. Sooner or later, you will run into the person(s) involved in the project and untangle any wires that might’ve crossed.

The same can’t be said when managing an offsite team.

This is the biggest reason why you can’t afford to joke with the tools and tech you employ.

If you cut corners with the infrastructure and digital tools needed for collaboration and engagement, you can expect the quality of work done to suffer.

So, you must make the right tech available for yourself and your team members.

2.    Outline Responsibilities And Tasks Clearly

Managing cross-cultural remote teams successfully starts with establishing clear expectations for each unit member. While it might be tempting to do so, you must resist the urge to micromanage your team.

As a matter of fact, one of the biggest secrets to effective time management for remote managers is ensuring that you divvy up the tasks just right. Everyone knows what to do and when unrealistic expectations are easily avoided.

Some things you have to attend to long those lines include:

• Arranging work schedules
• Tracking remote team performance metrics
• Highlighting your goals and objectives for the team
• Detailing other logistic elements necessary for the smooth execution of projects

Something else that might help here is defining the gap in responsibilities. This means establishing the ideal workload for each team member and determining whether they are currently working at capacity.

3.    Encourage Accountability

There’s a place to give your remote workers free rein and allow them to do their thing. After all, the absence of intense scrutiny is one of the best things about working from home for most employees. However, this doesn’t mean you must throw accountability out the window. You just need to make sure you employ the right approach when doing so.

Some ways you can go about this is by ensuring that you create sufficient team and one-on-one opportunities to engage you. In addition, ensure that you establish a set schedule to stay updated on relevant proceedings. You can use your company’s needs and culture to determine the ideal time for these reports.

4.    Avoid Micromanaging

No good thing comes from micromanaging a team, remote or otherwise. Some effects of maintaining such a culture in your remote workspace include high employee turnover, less enthusiasm, low morale, and impaired productivity, among other things.

What you can do instead is put conscious thought and effort into hiring and onboarding remote employees who share the same vision for your company. A big part of this involves giving more preference to prospects with enhanced social skills, showing clear self-awareness, displaying a significant degree of empathy, and appearing self-motivated. These types of individuals only need a little prodding to perform their duties. Organizations like GitHub and Google have employed these tactics with much success.

In addition to this, hone your communication skills and learn how to delegate responsibilities effectively. This will ensure you assign the right tasks to the right personnel so your workflow isn’t impaired.

5.    Promote Flexible Working

True, working remotely already signals a fair amount of flexibility. Still, you have a role to make your team feel comfortable enough to bring out the group’s best. Here, it’s the little things that matter most.

Refrain from checking on your team around the clock. Avoid mandating stipulated work hours. Don’t bar them from taking breaks during work hours.

Doing any of the above will place needless stress and strain not just on your staff but on you as well. This is more so if you manage cross-cultural remote teams in different time zones.

Of course, accountability is critical, and you still need to ensure that everyone is on track. One way to address this is to use your work culture and other elements like differences in time zones to create a daily, weekly, or bi-weekly report schedule that works for everyone.

Remember that, ultimately, what you’re most interested in is the result. Leave the small elements of how these results are achieved to your team.

6.    Develop Active Listening Skills

Most managers know how to talk. Only a few of leaders have a lid on the art of listening. Active listening skills are arguably one of the most essential virtual leadership skills you can pick up today.

Programs like Leadership Mastery and Transformational Leadership offer some of the best insights into how to get this done. 

If you can leverage remote team collaboration and project management tools (Asana, Trello, Jira, and so on) to achieve fluid multi-directional communication, you will be fine with leading your team to great things.

So, expand your engagement with your team to just giving updates or passing instructions. Actively encourage feedback and let them know that their thoughts and opinions matter. Make a habit of checking on your employees to see how they’re doing instead of only requesting assignment status updates.

Here, you can find some of the best materials for honing your listening skills across various levels. The combination of free and paid courses here will efficiently address your immediate and long-term learning needs.

7.    Trust Your Employees

Remote work management of any sort is only possible in trust. Simply put, you can’t have your team thinking they don’t have your confidence. This is bad for morale and productivity; your remote team performance metrics will reflect that.

Again, remember that your aim here is for them to deliver top-quality results. “Desk time” is not necessarily a function of that. 

8.    Incorporate Feedback Readily

Leaving the avenue for your team members to express themselves is one thing. Letting them understand that you appreciate their opinions is another. One of the best ways to do that is by readily incorporating their feedback.

Regardless of the nature of the type of feedback, start by appreciating them for their input. You could say, “Thanks for sharing this with me, [insert name here]. I value your input. I’ll look into this at length and work towards a better outcome in the future.” 

Make sure you assess all the input from your employees and evaluate the credibility of these opinions to determine how relevant they will be to overall work productivity.

Where it’s practicable, be bold and implement the feedback. And, in instances where it isn’t, be sure to let your staff know why you won’t be putting their recommendations into effect.

9.    Celebrate Individual Effort

At any point, it always feels good to be celebrated. Various studies have shown that proper recognition and appreciation of your employees can significantly enhance their work outlook. This will increase remote team performance metrics like output quality, learning and development, and overall well-being.

Let them know that you’re happy with the results that they produce by giving them the recognition that they deserve. Many supervisors don’t acknowledge the excellent work their staff do because they believe it’s their due.

However, setting the standard by letting them know you see what they do can boost their confidence, especially when working remotely. Tools like Dayllo, Reflectly, and Zinnia Planner & Journal can make coordinating your efforts here easier. 

10.  Keep Communication Strong

Communication is central to success when managing cross-cultural remote teams. Virtual leadership skills that are efficiently translated through good communication can do wonders for you.

Some results you can expect when you keep a strong line of communication with your team include:

• Deeper trust and bond between supervisor and employees
• Maximized productivity potential of the unit
• Seamless and rewarding collaborations
• Company stays on track
• Significant morale boost

Tools like Slack, Hive, and Fleep provide the ideal environment for fostering this level of communication. As a result, higher collaboration, enhanced coordination, and increased performance and productivity become more easily achievable.

11.  Keep Scalability In Mind

Sustainable remote work management is contingent on your ability as the team lead to have a clear long-term vision for your unit. There are several facets to planning for the future of your team.

This means you must ensure you don’t use stopgaps for most operations. This means everything from the communication network you leverage to your operations plan must be optimized for scalability. This will ensure that your work process is always successful at all points.

Similarly, you must acquire resources for yourself and your staff with an eye on the future. Future-proofing your unit can be a considerable strain initially. However, further down the line, this is more financially expedient as you would spend less on the whole than constantly overhauling and replacing equipment.

12.  Encourage Social Interaction

While it might seem counterintuitive to effective time management for remote managers, you need to make allowance for social interactions between your team members. You can add an element of structure to this using a variant of the Pomodoro technique. 

For instance, they could work uninterrupted for about 25 to 30 minutes and engage their colleagues for about 5 minutes afterward. They can rinse and repeat this process all through their preferred work time.

There are several good reasons this is good practice.

For example, it makes it much easier for your team members to avoid the rigors of remote work isolation. In addition, social interactions help with managing remote work conflicts.

Because your team members will have the opportunity to get to know each other, they’ll be able to reach common ground much more quickly.

What Happens When Remote Work Management Goes Wrong

On many levels, remote work is a much better alternative to the conventional workplace. However, there are usually consequences when remote team collaboration and project management tools aren’t applied and implemented as they should be.

The three most common ones you can expect include:

1.    Employees Get Easily Distracted

According to the Upgraded Points poll, remote workers who were surveyed spent as much as 75% of their work time carrying out activities like surfing the net, using social media, and planning trips. Similarly, other remote workers used their work time to run errands and perform household chores.

The above signs are most commonly seen when efficient remote team communication strategies aren’t employed when managing your unit.

2.    Team Members Get Isolated

One of the biggest threats to achieving top remote team performance metrics is the feeling of loneliness and isolation. The threat of this challenge has become so well-known that many employees are starting to shy away from remote work altogether.

3.    Team Productivity And Efficiency Drops

Efficiency and team productivity also take a hit when remote work isn’t properly managed. There are several reasons for this. For example, because many of these workers may not be able to stay on task for an appreciable length, the amount of work and, by extension, the quantity and quality of results they can produce will also dip.

When Microsoft initially implemented the work-from-home policy for some members of its staff in 2019, they found that lapses ensued in communication, and there was an overall dip in performance as a result. Several measures had to be taken to restore the productivity of the remote workers to a peak level.

Making Working Remotely Work For You

Proper remote work management can open your company to a world filled with endless possibilities. Amassing the right virtual leadership skills, choosing the right tech, monitoring your team’s’ activities the right way, and trusting your employees effectively ensures you’ll increase productivity, lower costs, and save time.

Popular Questions About Remote Work Management

Why Does Remote Work Yield Such Positive Results?

Remote work yields such positive results because it makes it easier for employees to achieve a healthy work-life balance. Because these individuals are typically in greater control over elements like their work schedule, they can fine-tune priorities to better suit their needs.

This work arrangement leads to higher efficiency and productivity among remote workers.

Is It Possible To Manage Effectively Remotely?

Yes, managing effectively and growing your remote team performance metrics is possible. You must employ the right remote team communication strategies, hone your virtual leadership skills, and leverage the appropriate remote team collaboration and project management tools to achieve your team goals.

How Can I Join Remote Work Management?

I shared on the pros and cons of managing remote work in this article, but good question here. I must also reiterate that taking on a remote management role can be a fulfilling calling if you’re into climbing the remote career ladder. You can check out some of my remote career resources here, but in short, the easiest entry to a management role is by working with a startup. At least in my humble experience, that’s how I quickly escalated from a junior to senior role in less than 5 years.

What Are The Biggest Challenges of Managing Cross-Cultural Remote Teams?

The biggest challenges of managing cross-cultural remote teams include the need for clearly defined expectations, efficient remote team communication strategies, efficient time management for remote managers, and feelings of loneliness and isolation among employees.

What Is The Best Remote Work Culture?

The best remote work culture is based on clear and concise communication between the supervisor and team members. It’s one where the employees are trusted to deliver quality work on time instead of being micromanaged every step of the way.

Is Remote Work Truly Beneficial For Employers?

Yes, remote work is genuinely beneficial for employers. Remote work management can pay several worthwhile dividends when planned and executed correctly. These include reducing operating costs, enhancing employee productivity, and reducing turnover.