In today’s digital world, more companies are hiring remote employees to get the talented and skilled employees from worldwide. Employees nowadays prefer to work remotely and many leading companies offering this opportunity to gain more productivity. Adding such remote employees to the team has some challenges. Remote work has its pros and cons. The best part about working remotely is that a person can work from anywhere. It is flexible and saves cost at the same time remote employees have less interaction with the team members. Communication gap is one of the biggest challenges while managing a virtual team. It is the responsibility of the leader to bridge these interpersonal gaps and take several steps to connect remote team.
Set Clear Goals
If the goals and outline are clearly defined with the remote employees, then it will help them to perform the task quickly in prescribed time boundaries. As a manager and leader, it is important to discuss the expectation clearly with them such as work hours, availability, communication system, key project, and deadlines. The team mates who works in the different country with different time zone especially with them discuss work schedule clearly. This will help the employees to follow the schedule and they can timely complete the work. A manager can conduct virtual meetings to discuss the goals and work schedules with the virtual team mates. Such transparency will help to maintain a positive relationship between leader and team mates.
Right Communication System
How important is to have a good communication system when your team might be spread across multiple cities or maybe countries? The office team meets and interact on daily basis during official meetings, can ask questions during lunch break or casually talk with a coworker at any time. But for the virtual team, who cannot meet personally on daily basis, it is necessary to have clear interaction.
Video chat
Some communications can be handled over the voice call or emails but some communication needs to handle only with video call or chat. Especially with virtual employees who aren’t physically present in the office, the video chat is a perfect alternative of face to face communication. Video chat would be even better as it gives more visual signals of what is going on with the other person. It makes the remote team feels more real about the company’s culture. Many apps are available for quick real-time interaction.
Screen Sharing Tools
Several tools are available that enable to share the screen with another person so that a person can see exactly track and view remote employees screen. These tools also allow controlling the other computer remotely. Many of such tools are available for small teams, including TeamViewer and Join.me. These tools provide real-time updates regarding the screen and make project management easier.
Team Chat Apps
In this instant chatting and sharing period, it is essential to have a chat room open for each team in the business. The team members can easily leave messages for the team that they are a part of. Virtual team members can receive prompt reply on important issues and it makes them feel connected with the whole team. Team chat apps can be used to brainstorm, pass files back and forth, compare notes on new releases, and many more. It is a place to talk about anything, work-related or not which helps to synchronize the remote team.
Use Time-Tracking Tools
To keep the track of remote employees’ performance is a cumbersome task for the manager. But with the use of time tracking software and tools, the clear data on the work time can be gathered. Such tools provide accurate login and log out timing and at the same time, unproductive activities can be spotted easily. Attendance software provides accurate time reports which help the manager to track the timings of the remote employee and measure the performance. The App like Due time tracking which allows tracking the idle time of the remote employee, many such apps like Harvest, TopTracker, RescueTime and more which are effective time-tracker tools for freelancer employees.
Gone are days when remote working was considered as a low salary employment option. With the change in trend, it has now become a full-time career. Today, technology gets the same job done wherever the person is in the world. Managing a remote team is a big deal, to get done assignment on time, keeps track of the work and building a strong relationship with them. Moreover, it is very important to have loyal, hard-working and productive employees that will help to reach the company vision. Companies are trying to get into this changing scenario to keep up with the changing need of their employees and to adapt to talent from different parts of the world.
Tactics
