Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees
Since the pandemic changed the world of work as we knew it, hybrid work or remote work has become the norm for a large portion of US employees.
When we surveyed 4,100 full-time employees across the U.S., U.K., Ireland, and Canada in "The Evolution of Work" report, we found that over 50% of the workforce is either hybrid or fully remote (40% hybrid and 11% fully remote).
While these arrangements bring numerous benefits to both employees and the companies they work for, managing remote employees in these new settings can also bring a new set of challenges. It's important for leaders to remember that they're just as responsible for their employees as they work remotely as they would be if they came to work in-person.
Read on for tips and best practices to effectively manage remote employees from wherever they choose to work.
What are the challenges of managing remote workers?
Learning to manage your employees in an entirely new remote setting poses its own set of challenges, but can be made much simpler by doing the following:
Communicating effectively
It can feel difficult to communicate well when your team is working from various locations, in different time zones, or even in different countries. While being in different places may seem like a big enough challenge to begin with, working asynchronously adds a whole other layer of difficulty.
To make the remote work environment feel more cohesive, consider holding a daily scrum meeting to ensure you are disseminating all the information to your remote and hybrid employees, not scheduling video calls at inconvenient times, and answering any questions they may have as quickly as possible.
It's also important to honor your team's communication preferences, whether that is for email, Slack, Zoom, phone calls, texts, or any other method.
Avoiding burnout
When employees are working from their homes, it's important to remember that they are then also living at work. Some remote employees may find this lack of separation in their environments to be freeing, while others may find it incredibly isolating and overwhelming.
Also, it may feel tempting to increase remote employees' workloads, as you're under the assumption that they're "just sitting at home." However, this is a dangerous and unfair way of thinking that can overwhelm employees and burn them out quickly, leading to lower productivity and higher rates of turnover in your organization.
Managing resources effectively
It can be difficult to know which funds, assets, tools, etc. are being used for what purpose when your employees are all working from different locations. To combat this issue, ensure that employees are documenting expenses diligently and request reporting on new tools, equipment, or materials to help you evaluate how company assets are being used.
This will help you see what's working, as well as identify areas for improvement.
How do you manage employees who work remotely?
These tips for managing a remote team will help your team stay on task and produce their best work:
Build trust in a virtual environment
Trust is vital to team cohesion, manager-employee relationships, and, ultimately, productivity. Trust can be built by consistently supporting and showing up for your employees. By addressing their concerns in a timely manner, handling conflicts as they arise, and showing concern for them as holistic beings, not simply as employees.
Management styles that prioritize empathy and people-first leadership are often the most effective. When you take the time to provide emotional support for your employees, you show them that they are worth more to you than simply what they can produce, which helps deepen their sense of psychological safety.
Download our exclusive report to discover how to create an environment that takes the safety of all employees into account.
Define clear roles for each team member
The last thing you want when your team is remote is for employees to be unclear on their responsibilities or accidentally complete duplicative work. Not only is this incredibly frustrating, it's also a giant waste of time and resources for all involved.
By defining clear roles, you can help eliminate confusion, keep your employees on track, and avoid potential power struggles or redundancies in the future.
Create strong workflows and structures
Because working from so many different locations may cause miscommunications at times, it's extremely important to have clear, documented workflows for everyone to reference. This will help your employees work from home more effectively and productively, with much less confusion and wasted time. Just because they aren't working face-to-face doesn't mean the team can't thrive together!
Facilitate regular check-ins
It's extremely important for remote managers to check in with their remote workers and ensure that they know what's going on in their lives, both personally and professionally. Setting time aside for weekly one-on-ones shows how deeply you're invested in each employees' success, even from a distance.
Checking in can help you stay aware of where there are roadblocks with workflows, interpersonal issues with team members, or even things in an employee's home life that may be affecting their performance. Not only will this strengthen your individual relationships with your employees, it will also help you manage your entire team as a whole.
Frequent, high-quality check-ins between managers and employees are essential. Learn 12 helpful tips for managers and employees to have more positive check-in experiences.
Be flexible
The biggest perk of remote work is the flexibility it provides employees. Each of them has a unique set of responsibilities as an individual in the world, and those personal obligations may affect them in different ways. Allowing for flexibility in working hours, schedules, etc. can help employees create and maintain a deep sense of work-life balance.
Not only will this help their stress levels overall, it will also help them be more present and engaged during working hours. This is because they know that they have the time and freedom necessary to handle all the things that truly matter in their lives.
Recognize and celebrate success
It's especially important in a remote environment, where workers can sometimes feel siloed, to ensure that everyone is aware of one another's awesome contributions.
Sharing these "wins" during team meetings, calling them out in email newsletters, or even giving shoutouts in messaging channels such as Slack can all be great ways to give your employees much-deserved recognition. A little gratitude can go a long way in keeping remote employees motivated.
Respect time zone differences
No one likes to work outside of their scheduled hours. This can also be extremely inconvenient for employees who live in different parts of the world and may be working while their team members are fast asleep. Workers can feel pressured to be "on call" 24/7, which is both stressful and unrealistic.
To combat this issue, try to schedule team meetings at times that work best for everyone involved, or have team members "take turns" signing on early or staying on late. Also, make sure that employees know that any emails or Slack messages they receive outside of their own working hours don't need to be answered right away.
This helps keep things equitable and ensures that no one team member is bearing the burden of asynchronous work on their own.
Monitor employees' workloads
It's important to ensure that work is being divided equitably throughout the team, and that deadlines and project scopes are realistic and achievable. A huge part of successfully managing remote employees is ensuring that they're not overwhelmed or unable to complete the tasks assigned to them in a timely manner.
Project management tools like Asana can be extremely helpful for managing a fully remote workplace. With these tools, you can "peek in" to see the status of projects, address and questions or concerns, and ensure that workers feel supported and projects stay on track.
Embrace technology
Messaging software, collaboration tools, and other forms of technology can all be extremely useful when managing a remote workforce. These simple tools can help employees brainstorm, communicate more effectively, and manage both their individual and shared projects in a more streamlined way.
Remote work is here to stay, so it's imperative that leaders embrace all the other advances that come along with it.
Offer remote recruiting
Employees who aren't required to be in the office for work shouldn't be required to come in for interviews. Offering remote onboarding through tools like Zoom or similar technology shows that your team is fully prepared to support a remote workforce all the way through the employee lifecycle.
Educate employees about company values
Just because a workforce is remote doesn't mean that a company can't have strong values and a robust culture. Creating resources explaining these values, as well as praising employees for exemplifying them, can help your entire team stay aware of what's most important to the company. This, in turn, will help create more unified goals and guide communication and behavior.
FAQs
How can Human Resources support remote employees?
To manage remote teams more effectively, HR can stay abreast of the outlook and attitude of their employees. One easy way to accomplish this is through pulse surveys, which help those in leadership gain a deeper understanding of how employees are feeling about their roles, what issues need to be addressed, and ultimately, what's working and what isn't.
Is remote work bad for productivity?
The opposite is true. Due to reduced stress, better work-life balance, and no mind-numbing commutes to begin and end the day, employees who work in a remote setting are actually much more productive than their hybrid or in-house teammates. In fact, studies have proven that remote workers are up to 47% more productive.
How should I handle remote employees who are underperforming?
First, speak to them to see if workload, burnout, or personal issues are contributing to the problem. If anything is within your control to support, it's important to take action. If the employee expresses not feeling trained correctly for their roles or that they don't have adequate resources available to achieve their goals, it's important to address those issues as well.
Conclusion
While there may be a learning curve when transitioning from managing employees in-office to managing a hybrid team or a fully remote workforce, it's proven that these working styles are better for all involved in the long run. Through learning to communicate more clearly, respect employees' boundaries, and support work-life balance, you provide your team with tools to help them thrive in any environment, virtual or otherwise.