I feel lonely working from home…
When should I take my lunch break?
My computer has packed in…
You’ve probably heard these complaints if you’re managing a remote team. And it’s no surprise. These are some of the common employee struggles that are causing challenges for managers daily.
The truth is, managing a remote team can be a bumpy road if you’re not prepared for the challenges ahead.
But don’t let that deter your organisation from encouraging remote work as there are loads of benefits that far outweigh the challenges. This post will cover the most common challenges of managing a remote team and how to overcome them.
7 common challenges when managing remote teams – and how to overcome them
Communication and Collaboration
In an office, it’s easy to bring your team together to discuss anything and everything. But for a remote team, it can be tricky to maintain open communication. A lot can get lost in peer-to-peer chats that don’t get shared with the rest of the group, and sometimes it can be difficult to pull people into a call when you need to talk to someone urgently.
On top of these challenges, getting your team on the same page and working in tandem can be difficult. Some of your team might not feel involved with the group, not understand what others are working on or even recognise their impact on the larger team.
Solution:
Your team needs a dedicated business communications platform for everyone to work from. Within that platform, you’ll need to set up a few things:
- Dedicated channels for different projects
- Dedicated chats for different projects
Once you’ve set them up, you’ll need to be clear on how you want your team to communicate. This means giving them guidelines and examples of:
- What’s classed as informal communication (things that can be shared in separate chats).
- What’s classed as peer-to-peer specific (things that are only relevant to the individual).
- What’s team/project specific (things that are important for a larger group of stakeholders).
You won’t be able to cover every issue that comes up with these guidelines, so it’s important to measure how your team collaborates afterwards, to make further improvements.
Key metrics include:
- Collaboration trends insights to help identify remote working trends amongst team members and groups, across messages, meetings and calls.
- Team Activity analysis to analyse team activity levels as well as understanding the overall team sentiment.
- Dashboard insights to identify team engagement trends
- Management style insights
Mental health and Wellbeing challenges
As a manager, it can be hard to know when your remote employees are suffering from mental health and wellbeing challenges. But there are some signals that you can watch out for.
Some key signs that your remote employees are suffering are:
- Their work becomes sloppy.
- They stop offering input in discussions.
- They frequently call in sick.
- They stop interacting with colleagues.
- They aren’t interested in their career development.
It’s extremely important to look for these signs so you can support their mental health and reduce the impact on your organisation.
Solution:
Your team must have access to someone they discuss their mental health with.
By introducing a paid 24/7 mental health helpline to your company, employees will have access to a counsellor who can provide immediate emotional support and spot any potential problems before they become more severe.
It’s also worth offering a flexible work schedule for your employees, as 43% of people without this option feel it would help them better manage their mental health. With more flexibility in the day, they can attend their morning Yoga class or go for a coffee with a friend, all things that could benefit their mental health.
Couple this with visibility over their working behaviours and trends to spot changes over time, making it easy to know when to provide extra care and support.
Time zone differences
One of the biggest challenges when managing a remote team is trying to schedule a call or meeting in different time zones.
You might want to schedule your weekly meeting at 10 am UK time, but that’s 5:00 am in Canada. It’s not always fair for the person in Canada to wake up that early each week.
Solution:
In reality, being flexible is crucial for managing employees in different time zones.
But to make it more manageable, try to schedule meetings at a time that works for everyone and is not outside their working hours. There probably will be times when you need to be more flexible, so try moving the working day to either start later and have a later finish or start earlier and have an early finish.
If you make unexpected calls to different time zones, use a time zone management tool to know who is nodding off to sleep and who is available – and be sure to keep an eye on the number of meetings held out of hours, and who is affected, to ensure that meetings are scheduled fairly.
Tracking work and productivity
Are you aware of how much work your remote workers do daily? For many managers, the answer is pretty unclear.
It can be hard to know if your team are pulling their weight without seeing what they’re getting up to. When there is a lack of trust within a team, this can cause a series of issues leading to micromanagement.
Your employees will soon get fed up with being micromanaged and could potentially leave the business altogether if they do not feel trusted..
Solution:
Set up some KPIs as an expectation of how much work should be completed each day, such as:
- Making 50 cold calls
- Scheduling 10 social media posts
- Write a company blog.
Now you’ve set the KPIs for your team; you need to track their productivity.
It can be helpful for team leaders to visualise their team’s productivity levels through various different methods. Here’s some tips:
- Use insights on individual team members and benchmark the findings with aggregated group data.
- Analyse how your teams’ collaboration methods. Are they spending too much time in meetings? Can this time be reduced?
- Help fellow team members to get insight on the way they collaborate to improve communication and save time. Extended hours and extreme collaboration do not always represent productivity!
Keeping your team motivated
For some people, staying motivated when working from home can be a real challenge. A study found that 44% of employees under 35 years old experienced a lack of motivation, mainly caused by home distractions and a lack of connection.
Having a lack of motivation can make it challenging to get work done. Your team could end up missing important deadlines or producing poor-quality work.
Solution:
Unfortunately, as a manager, there’s not much you can do to eliminate their home distractions. You can, however, offer incentives to motivate them to get their work done because, according to the Incentive Theory, actions are directed toward gaining rewards.
Setting a monetary bonus is an excellent way to motivate your employees because it’s a prize almost everyone would be interested in working for. You can use the KPIs, we told you about earlier in this post and offer an annual cash bonus if targets are met. If the cash bonus is attractive enough, you can be sure they’ll do the work to get it.
Be sure to give your team members full visibility of, and access to, their progress throughout the process for the most meaningful impact.
Getting your team together in person
One of the most enjoyable parts of working with others is having that social interaction where you enjoy lunch together or go to the local pub after work. It allows you to get to know them more personally and have a laugh.
This can be much harder with a remote team, where everyone lives in different places and time zones. The after-work drinks or water cooler chats just don’t exist in remote teams.
Solution:
Make a plan to get your entire team together at least once a year, so they have the opportunity to socialise in person instead of behind a screen. You could take your team for a trip abroad or hire a venue for some drinks, food and fun activities.
But when organising these events, it’s important to always give them plenty of notice in advance so they can plan their travel and potentially book accommodation.
You don’t have to feel limited to meeting once a year. In fact, the more, the better, as it will help keep your remote workers connected. You don’t always have to plan something glamorous. Try some of the below activities that are easy to arrange:
- Book review club
- A game of rounders
- Pub quiz
- Escape room
Technical Difficulties
When you work in an office, resolving technical issues is easier as you probably have spare equipment or someone from the IT team in the building.
With remote work, things can become complicated.
If technical issues arise, receiving new equipment or waiting for a tech-savvy person to resolve the issue could take a while. This downtime will add pressure to the team when deadlines are approaching, so it needs to be dealt with quickly.
Solution:
Create a backup plan if your employees cannot complete their work due to technical difficulties. You should consider things like:
- Listing some tasks that can be done using a pen and paper.
- Check to see if your employees have access to a local library with computers while waiting for their replacement.
- Make their work folders available from a shared folder on the cloud so that they can be accessed from another computer.
- Having enough spare equipment ready to be shipped to the employees.
- Making a list of common PC faults (e.g. software) and instructions to resolve them.
- Ensure your employees can still be contacted without a computer, such as Whatsapp, Microsoft Teams mobile, or a Facebook group chat.
Summary
Managing a remote team can certainly be a bumpy road if you’re not prepared to deal with the challenges ahead. But with some solutions in place, you’ll be able to manage them as you would in the office successfully.
Here are 10 solutions from our post that will help you overcome these challenges:
- Set up a dedicated business communications platform for everyone to work from.
- Be clear on how you want communication to look by setting guidelines.
- Measure how your team collaborates with Analytics 365.
- Introduce a paid counsellor for immediate emotional support.
- Offer a flexible work schedule.
- Schedule meetings at a time that works for everyone and not outside working hours.
- Set some KPIs for your team to set expectations.
- Offer a cash incentive if KPIs are met.
- Make a plan to get with your entire team at least once a year.
- Create a backup plan if your employees cannot complete their work due to technical difficulties.
But remember, as well as solving challenges, you’re also going to make plenty of mistakes. So take a look at our post, where you can avoid ‘5 Big Mistakes Managers Make When Managing Remote Teams’.
