3 Tips For Managing A Remote Team Effectively

What exactly is remote work?

Remote working, as the name implies, entails working away from a traditional office environment. It is not required to do a task in a specific location such as a house, coffee shop, or anywhere else to be completed successfully.

Instead of traveling to an office every day to work at a specific workstation, remote employees can complete their assignments and meet their goals from anywhere they want. As a result, people may organize their days to enjoy their job and personal lives to the fullest and coexist peacefully.

Due to COVID19, more and more businesses and entrepreneurs prefer to work from home and are looking for ways to manage their remote teams effectively. However, managing a remote team has many challenges, and it is not an easy task for all managers. To manage a remote team, employers face a lot of difficulties and challenges.

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In this blog, we will see those challenges and provide a better solution for every challenge. We will try to ease the headache of all the managers and supervisors regarding managing their remote team’s productivity. So here are the top 11 tips and tricks to manage a remote team effectively.

1.While Selecting a Team, Choose Assets.

When your business is working remotely, always focus on selecting team members who can be an asset for you, not a liability, because everyone can not work remotely and, most importantly, work in a remote team. It requires high dedication and a disciplined person to work with the team remotely. Selecting a competent remote team is not an easy task, but keep in mind that the right team selection can lead to project completion. On the contrary, wrong team selection can lead to project failures and even hit you both financially and mentally.

Make it Easy to Hire new People.

We know it can be tough to recruit new people and integrate them into an already established team. However, there are some things you can prepare for this new team member. For example, a PDF file explaining what they do can give them information about their work and links to look at later. Or are you a more visual manager? You can ask your team to make a short video presentation about yourself so that everyone can get to know each other better.

2. Communicate Daily.

Communication is the process of transferring your thoughts, ideas, or information from one person to another person. Regular communication between team members and the project manager is required for the successful completion of the project. In simple words, communication is the key to the success of any project. However, no proper communication between team members and the project manager can lead to project failures and affect the company’s reputation too.

Healthy two-way communication between team members and management is required to share feedback and exchange ideas. Daily communication is a crucial step to make sure the project is done on time. Communication with the team daily also boosts the morale of the team members, and it also generates a feeling of accountability among team members. They start feeling that they are accountable to the project manager and they have to complete the task at any cost.

How to effectively communicate with your employees daily?

1. Communicate daily through emails as email is a bit professional.
2. Always give your feedback. Feedback is like appreciation, and it motivates team members.
3. Plan digital meetups and events.
4. Use video conferencing platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Skype.
5. Ideas are the foundations of new inventions. Discuss ideas regularly.

More communication builds more trust and a more sense of responsibility.

Internal Company Blog

Internal company blogs are a more professional way of communication with the team members. Project Managers can use the internal company blogs for announcements, web updates, internal changes, or anything related to the remote team. The internal blog must be private and doesn’t need to be fancy. You can make an internal blog very simple, and all team members can reply to the blog to create a chat thread. 

Meet Personally 

To build more trust, know more about your team members, have good socialization, try to meet with team members personally. Of course, when working in a remote team, it is not required to meet every week or month, but you can meet with each other at least once or twice a year. When you are working in a team, you should know about your team members, their face and voice, and some attributes so that while working, you can understand each other better and appreciate their mindset and ideas.

Team-Building

Talking to a team means communicating. Communication means exchanging ideas and considering new tasks or projects. Give your team members some team building home exercises like write some words about themselves, what they like or dislike etc. Engage them socially as well as professionally. The purpose here is to communicate with members and get to know each other.

3. Selecting Right Employee Productivity Measuring Tool.

Selecting the right productive tool or employees monitoring tool is crucial when working with a remote team. Often, project failures happen because of a lack of communication between the project manager and team members and the selection of improper productivity tools.

Here, we will discuss the three best remote team monitoring and productive tool, explore various features, and see why it’s best for the managers handling teams remotely.

EmpMonitor

EmpMonitor is at the top of our list because it’s one of the best Employee Monitoring and productivity management tool. It is more feature-rich than any other tool present in the market. We will see some of the features of EmpMonitor, which makes this tool a competitive tool when it comes to team member tracking and management.

1. Monitors Employees: EmpMonitor captures and records the productivity of every team member working remotely.
2. Keep an eye on employees: EmpMonitor automatically takes screenshots at regular intervals and records all the screen activities.
3. Secure: EmpMonitor is a safe and secure tool, and it also blocks all kinds of insider threats. This tool reviews, records, and analyzes threats from time to time.
4. Triple Productivity: EmpMonitor Pump up your productivity levels by eliminating the rest hours and idle activities.
5. Time tracking: EmpMonitor tracks the remote team’s exact working and non-working hours, making it the best choice for employers looking for remote teams management tools.
6. Chat Monitoring: EmpMonitor also tracks the amount of time spent by employees on chat applications during their work hours which is essential while measuring productivity at an individual level.
7. Clients feature: EmpMonitor also monitors time spent on a client and client’s project.
8. Powerful Reports: EmpMonitor provides clean and detailed reports and graphs showing your staff’s performance and productivity. What else do you want from a productivity tool?
9. Web & Apps Usage Monitoring: EmpMonitor also tracks the most visited website URLs and Applications. So you can easily track your staff members if they are using social media or playing games during their work hours.
10. Payments: EmpMonitor automates all the payroll processes and payments with the clients too. It also automates the billing process. So it is an all one tool for all sorts of management related to remote teams.
11. All Devices: EmpMonitor is a cross-platform tool and is compatible with all devices and operating systems like Windows laptops, MACs, Android Devices, etc.
12. Integrations: EmpMonitor can be easily integrated with other popular accounting and managing tools to extend tool functionality. Integration is very smooth in this tool which makes it a better choice among other productivity measuring tools.
13. Alerts: EmpMonitor gives you an alert after every regular interval of time to avoid wasting time and increase productivity at the remote workspace.
14. GPS Tracking: EmpMonitor also tracks the exact location of your remote team members via their device and lets you know from where they are working. 
15. Off Track Reminders: EmpMonitor also alerts you to stay away from non-work websites during your work hours to achieve maximum productivity.
16. IP Safelisting: EmpMonitor also safelists IP addresses and allows team leaders to visit specific websites via white-labeled IPs.
17. Attendance Logs: EmpMonitor also keeps a record of your remote team members’ exact login and logout time for the last seven days.
18. Track Breaks: It also tracks the total amount of time spent away from the working devices. So this tool is very efficient to track breaks during work hours.
19. Keystrokes: EmpMonitor also tracks the keys pressed by your remote team members while working in real-time.
20. Browser History: This tool keeps the device history of your team members safely on the cloud even if your remote team members clear their device history at their end.

Desktime

Desktime is also a good option for handling remote teams. It has similar features compared to EmpMonitor like automatic time tracking, offline time tracking, custom reports, web and mobile app tracking, screenshots, etc.

Toggl 

Toggl is also a good time tracking tool for remote team productivity measuring and tracking. But EmpMonitor has more features and is more flexible when it comes to time tracking.

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Conclusion

Managing a remote team is not an easy task, but taking the help of some good tools can ease your work. Of course, all tools have some pros and cons, but all I suggest is to go with EmpMonitor as it has many features that other tools lack. In addition, it has very smooth integrations with other accounting tools, which makes this tool more competitive than the other tools in the market. And yeah, ease of use is also a plus point.