Managing, Accessing and Assessing Remote Teams
Covid-19 has pushed teams into isolation; it’s time to get ahead of this situation with technology and character. Like it or not, it has happened. The pandemic caused by Coronavirus has robbed us of our freedom and driven us to the confinement of our homes. In the last couple of months, millions of IT professionals, corporate employees, and other white- or blue-collar workers are trying to come to terms with the remote work culture.
Consequently, CEOs, managers, and leaders are in the middle of dealing with an uncalled-for remote work scenario. Work from home, which was once a fashion in the corporate industry, is now the new standard. Although managing remote teams isn't scarce in the usual industry setting, yet the current scale of the crisis is monumental. On these lines, let's take a look at the best practices that might help you manage, access, and assess your remote team.
Managing a Remote Team
Whatever kind of work situation may be, efficiency, agility, and effectiveness are the terms that define the process. Therefore, remote teams should also aim at achieving these. Yes, it's quite demanding in a work-from-home (WFH) scenario, and that's what we will address here in this section.
Daily check-ins: The most prominent disconnect in WFH's case is that it diminishes the human interaction within a team. Names on your email and messaging application replace the office buddies or colleagues that you used to work with daily, in your now deserted office building.
To maintain this connection within your team, managers need to arrange a daily check-in conference call of 10 to 15 minutes, inviting all the team members. However, it is necessary to note that this is merely an alignment call. Here team leads can list down that day's goals and maybe say a lighthearted 'Hi' to the team.
Teams are already using Zoom and Google Hangouts to accomplish this – and in some cases – even YouTube Live. The latter is becoming more popular for town halls by CEOs.
Expectation management: As the name suggests, it is the art of managing the expectations of your team members and also yourself. The idea is to reduce surprises in a team setting and timely apply course correction measures along the way. It becomes more relevant in a WFH environment. Communicate a lot with your team, ask them what they want to accomplish and how they want to do so. As a manager, you can help them realize these tasks. Assist them in finding new ways of getting things done and give them realistic targets.
To gain the confidence of your team, you can explain the reason behind favoring a particular way of working. You can also clarify the credentials upon which you'll measure the success of any project. It is essential in these times because you are not available to personally assist your team, and benchmarks become a necessity. The purpose being, you will require a benchmark for comparing them with the result a few weeks down the line during the review.
Provide the team: While your team gets down to delivering projects and tasks, managers should research new tools and aids that can help the team realize efficiency and agility. These resources can be anything from innovative software tools to hardware to a high-speed internet connection, which they usually have access to in a conventional office space.
You can also find new software within the scope of a company's IT restrictions. For such purposes, it is best to consult or even onboard the IT team for compliance.
Use technology tools: The remote work culture comes as a handsome opportunity to try new ways to manage your team. Use technology tools if they fit your particular use case and encourage your team members to try them out to gauge their response and comfort level.
A good number of teams already use some project management tools to keep track of deliverables. These times make it worthwhile for more teams to take advantage of them. Tools such as Trello, Monday, Slack, etc., can increase the team's engagement in the project.
Flexibility: There's a saying that seems to fit in this situation: 'Desperate times call for desperate measures.' We are not suggesting you go out of a company's preamble to accomplish your goals, but accommodating to varying situations when they happen can go a long way. Embrace this opportunity and innovate for any changing aspects that might deviate from the usual company protocol. An example can be allowing employees to work as they please. Since the workforce is working from home, it's best to enable the employees to choose the working hours of their liking, where they can be most productive.
Moreover, employees are saving a decent amount of time on commuting to and gelling with the workspace every day. Encourage your team to invest this time to meditate or exercise at home. Managers should make sure that they give their team members enough freedom to find a sweet spot to work rather than to expect to punch in and out daily.
Accessing Remote Teams
Accessing your remote team – in this case – means how you reach your team and the way you interact with them. It includes using the tools to reach your team, and then some more. Let's take a look at them.
Trust your team: Come what may you should always trust your team through thick or thin, especially in a WFH environment. And, you don't have to assert trust in your words alone, your strategy and structure must reflect it automatically. It should make your team members feel that they are in control of the project.
Technology to access your team: Be as communicative as you can be on the different messaging channels available to you. Use emails, Skype, Jabber, Slack, phone calls to get the word out. Reach out to individual team members if need be and make the first step. Give them clear guidelines to communicate and make suggestions.
Assessing Remote teams
Last but not least, let's take a look at the ways to assess your team. It is crucial to give extra care to this step as a review pipeline allows you to find loopholes and improve your work. It is also necessary for the evolution of a company and also for employee appraisals.
Focus on the outcome: During a routine workday – when everyone is under one roof – it is quite easy to manage every hour of your team and the way they work. However, this is not true in a WFH setting. In such a situation, managers must focus on the outcome rather than focusing on the way a team delivers.
By practicing this, managers can be less intrusive in the way they evaluate the team. More importantly, they can focus on judging the quality and the time frame the task was delivered. In-short, rather than focusing on the input method, the focus in on the output.
Ask for self-evaluation: Companies generally frown upon self-evaluation as employees tend to upsell themselves while doing so. However, keeping the current situation in mind, self-evaluation can help managers better understand the assessment of an employee. Managers can use the data to compare it to the outcome as well as the contribution of individual employees.
It will help them better identify the members that are the most active, productive, and performers, and then can accordingly reward them. They can also identify laggards and can put them on employee improvement plans.
In essence, the idea is to get different perspectives from you, the employee, and the projects' end. You will have more data to compare and will be able to make a more informed decision.
Provide feedback: Managers can practice this regularly as it helps clear any air of uncertainly on the employee's part. The remote working condition can stem doubts in the minds of team members around their work quality and delivery time.
Give them regular feedback as it will help them improve while they are at it. In this way, you can also ascertain how many members are deploying your suggestions and what effects it is having on short term deliverables.
Ask for feedback: As a leader, you should always be ready to learn and adapt along with the team. Team feedback is one of the ways to do this so that you can also make amends to yourself.
On the other hand, managers can also ask other employees to give feedback to their peers and coworkers. Managers must make sure they do it in a fashion that does not compromise the integrity of the workplace. Importantly, it is not a complaint session but only to have a better understanding of employees.
The world is moving towards a more decentralized work culture with the remote teams. And, to keep up with the change organizations, leaders, and managers need to adapt to better manage their teams. For some, it’s going to be a bit more challenging than others, but teams need to progress in this direction to learn to adapt.
October 2, 2020