Many organisations quickly responded to the pandemic by facilitating working from home arrangements within days. Collaboration and video tools such as Slack, Teams and Zoom soon became the normal even for those organisations that were new to remote work.
These tools coupled with high speed home Internet and corporate VPN’s meant employees could quickly establish a home office and remain connected to work resources.
The tech infrastructure is a key component, but managing remote teams requires a more deliberate approach compared to everyone being at the office.
In the absence of water cooler conversations and quick meetings, team members can quickly feel disconnected, unrecognized and unclear on work priorities.
Crewmojo equips managers with the key practices of high performing remote teams – ensuring each employee stays connected, engaged and productive.
The key practices for remote team management
- 1-on-1 meetings
Every team member should be scheduling a 1-on-1 meeting with their manager at least fortnightly. These meetings are mostly forward looking and a key goal is to establish absolute clarity over the coming week’s priorities to be achieved.
These priorities should be articulated as specific outcomes where both manager and employee will be happy if achieved. This approach helps to remove any focus on number of hours worked which can be contentious in newly formed remote teams.
The 1-on-1 is also an opportunity to build a more connected relationship by discussion well-being or the personal challenges associated with the new environment. In turn allowing managers to demonstrate empathy and understanding while brainstorming possible solutions to experiment with.
- Team meetings
Team meetings should be weekly and are an ideal avenue for managers to share important information such as team direction/goals and company or project updates that are likely to affect the team. Keeping people informed will build trust and increase certainty; and can help prevent the spread if misinformation.Team meetings can also be opportunity for some social time, group coaching or problem solving. But try to avoid individual status updates as this rapidly sucks time and typically doesn’t deliver too much value. - Status updates
Ask team members to spend 5 minutes on a Friday afternoon to reflect on their top 3 achievements for the week and what the 3 priorities will be for the coming week. Include a blockers they are struggling with which can be discussed and dealt with at the next 1-on-1 meeting.In addition to providing valuable work updates to managers; it acts as a journaling process for employees so they reflect on their weekly achievements and it keeps progress updates out of 1-on-1 meetings – allowing more time for high value forward looking coaching. - Feedback and recognition
Recognition brings meaning to work and helps ensure employees feel valued for their efforts. Feedback and recognition is a key management responsibility that can easily be overlooked in remote teams.
Managers can use content received from status updates to acknowledge contributions either directly to the individual or in the weekly team meeting if a more public recognition is desired.
Crewmojo puts each of these practices on auto-pilot so businesses can easily scale high performing remote teams across their organisation with our cloud-based platform and native apps.
Crewmojo encourages team members to share feedback, achieve goals and be values driven. Managers are equipped to extend 1:1s beyond the ‘status update’ and conduct meaningful conversations around objectives, development, career and more.
By Mark Lewis, CEO & Cofounder @ Crewmojo