Just a few years ago, the concept of full-time remote working seemed to be an unrealistic fantasy. However, a recent BBC study found that 44% of workers want to continue working from home in the future, and many would seek employment elsewhere if they were not given the chance to do so.

As such, it’s clear that remote work isn’t going anywhere any time soon, meaning many businesses must consider this their ‘default position’ moving forward. However, that’s not to say there aren’t any challenges associated with remote work. For example, a report from the Center For Transformative Work Design found that “38% of managers feel that remote teams perform worse than teams in the office.” As such, managers must ensure that their remote team performs just as well as an in-house team would.

In this article, we’ve pulled together some of the best strategies for building and

managing a high-performing remote team. We’ll run though the characteristics of a high-performing team, the common traits of underperforming teams to some actionable tips for building one.

Characteristics of High-Performing Teams:

To be able to build a high-performing team, it’s crucial that you understand the common behaviours and traits of one. High-performing teams usually have the following characteristics:

  • Clear Goals and Alignment. High-performing remote teams will share a thorough understanding of their goals (long and short-term), objectives, and priorities. This means they’ll work together effectively, even though they are not in the same room.
  • Trust and Accountability. High-performing remote teams establish trust through open communication, consistent delivery, and accountability. This encourages team members to take ownership of their work and ensures they always stay on target.
  • Collaboration and Support. High-performing remote teams will demonstrate the same levels of collaboration and support as in-house teams, given that they are working towards shared goals. They will support each other’s growth as much as possible.
  • Continuous Learning and Adaptability. High-Performing remote teams will embrace a growth mindset, which allows them to respond quickly to challenges and push your business toward success through innovation. 

The Common Characteristics Of Dysfunctional Remote Teams

Knowing the characteristics of a high-performing or dysfunctional team is the easy bit. The tough bit is spotting it in remote teams when your contact time is typically lower, and there needs to be more visibility. Remote team managers need to be able to spot the common traits of a dysfunctional team. These can include:

  • Communication: Communication breakdowns can further impair low-performing teams, leading to misunderstanding and inefficiency. The nuances of face-to-face communication are lost in virtual platforms, making it harder for team members to pick up on subtleties and emotional cues that guide effective conversation. For teams already struggling with performance, this additional communication barrier can exacerbate issues.
  • Trust and Accountability: In low-performing teams, the lack of physical proximity in remote work can compound existing issues with trust and accountability. If team members already lack trust in each other’s competencies or commitment, the distance and lack of visibility can lead to even more suspicion and discord. The inability of managers to directly supervise work can exacerbate accountability problems, leading to further declines in performance.
  • Collaboration and Engagement: A low-performing team may already struggle with engagement and collaboration. When shifted to a remote setting, these problems could worsen due to isolation and the lack of casual, spontaneous interactions that foster team bonding and cooperative problem-solving.
  • Time Management: Low-performing teams often struggle with productivity and time management. When working remotely, the challenges of setting boundaries between personal and professional time can lead to overwork and burnout, further impacting productivity negatively. If team members are already underperforming, they may feel compelled to work excessive hours to catch up, leading to burnout and even lower productivity in the long run.
  • Resources and Support: Low-performing teams might lack the skills to efficiently navigate the resources and support tools available in a remote work setup. This can lead to delays, frustrations and inefficient work processes. If they are not adequately trained or supported to utilise available resources, the team’s performance can be significantly impacted.

How You Can Use Analytics 365 to Identify Low-Performing/High-Performing Teams

As remote work evolves, our dependence on collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams will also increase. After all, there’s a reason why 91 out of 100 Fortune companies use Microsoft Teams for communication. The software allows you to tackle many of the pain points listed above, creating a digital workspace where communication and collaboration thrive.

However, simply having a team on Microsoft Teams does not guarantee effective collaboration – which is why we designed Analytics 365. By leveraging our features, you can gain valuable insights into team performance:

Analyse Communication Patterns.

Analytics 365 will provide you with access to important data, such as call and chat metrics, that allow you to better understand:

  • Team communications patterns
  • Call durations
  • Chat frequency
  • Meeting attendance

You can then harness this data to implement changes within your team that will allow for more effective communication, turning a dysfunctional remote team into a high-performing one.

Assess meeting habits.

Analytics 365 will also provide you with important data relating to meeting attendance. This includes:

  • Attendance
  • Total scheduled
  • Participation rates

As such, this will enable you to identify which teams (or team members) actively organise and contribute to meetings and which may be falling short. By identifying low-performers, you can begin to implement systems to combat this, perhaps by figuring out the cause of their disengagement. In short, it provides you with an effective way to manage your remote team.

7 Actionable Tips for Building a High-Performance Remote Team:

1. Set Clear Expectations.

Many remote employees often suffer from unclear and ambiguous goals and milestones that managers have set. Lack of clarity leads to miscommunication, confusion, poor performance and decreased productivity. These ultimately hinder your business growth and make employees feel frustrated, meaning they could leave the business altogether.

One of the best ways a remote manager can help counter this issue is by setting clear expectations and goals for each member of their team.

How to set clear expectations for your remote team:

  1. Identify the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
  2. Define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) goals for each role.
  3. Communicate these expectations and goals clearly to each team member.
  4. Implement a tracking mechanism to monitor progress towards these goals.

2. Foster Effective Communication.

As mentioned previously, working remotely can lead to a breakdown in both external and internal communication for remote employees. This can lead to feelings of isolation among team members, misalignment on tasks and projects, and ultimately lower productivity.

As a solution, businesses and managers should look to establish clear communication channels for different purposes, including calls, emails, video calls & instant messages.

They should also look to schedule regular check-ins and progress assessment meetings that can enhance your team’s connectivity and engagement. Remember, communication isn’t just about speaking; it’s about listening too.

You can also look to Analytics 365 features to help monitor the communication patterns of your remote team when using Microsoft Teams, including chat and call analytics.

How to foster effective communication in your remote team:

  1. Choose reliable and easy-to-use communication tools that suit your team’s needs.
  2. Establish communication protocols including when to use email, chat, video calls etc.
  3. Schedule regular check-ins and team meetings.
  4. Encourage open and two-way communication.

3. Promote Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing.

If not encouraged properly, remote teams can struggle with collaboration and knowledge sharing, leading to stagnant skill sets and hindering innovation within your business.

Businesses can remedy this by encouraging team collaboration using digital tools and software that facilitate knowledge sharing.

You can also look to schedule regular brainstorming and collaboration sessions, and utilise a platform for sharing new learnings can also help.

Our post on ‘How Technology and Software Can Help Remote Teams Collaborate‘ can provide you with more in-depth insight.

How to promote collaboration within your remote team:

  1. Make sure you’ve got the right tech stack for collaboration. At a minimum, you’ll need an IM solution, a project management tool and a platform for working and storing shared documents.
  2. Create formal sessions for knowledge sharing. You can implement things like a show and tell once a month, where the team will share and discuss the most interesting news or articles around their industry.
  3. Make sure you connect people. You’re job as a manager is to help connect people with skills and expertise in one area to another. So when you see someone who has done something interesting, ask, “Have you shown that to so and so? They’re doing something similar to that.”
  4. Create shared channels. Set up channels for sharing the latest information or interesting articles from around the web.
  5. Create a knowledge base where best practices are stored.

4. Monitor Performance Without Being A Micromanager.

Remote managers often struggle with giving their remote teams the right level of trust and accountability when carrying out their work.

This can often lead to an environment where managers feel like they have to micromanage their team in order to get the results they want.

Learning how to monitor the performance of your remote team correctly can be incredibly important for managers and remote businesses.

This is because you can quickly identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses. When you have this information, you can target areas of improvement and work together to implement changes to your working day.

How to monitor the performance of your remote employees:

  1. Implement a performance monitoring system that regularly tracks productivity and quality of work.
  2. Use data to identify areas of improvement.
  3. Work with team members to develop improvement strategies based on these insights.

5. Cultivate Trust and Psychological Safety.

Building a remote team that lacks trust and psychological safety can lead to a fear of taking risks, lower creativity, and cause the team to be disengaged.

To help alleviate this, remote managers should ensure they’re fostering an environment where team members feel safe to share ideas and take calculated risks.

Create open channels for feedback and encourage learning from mistakes rather than fearing them.

How to build trust and encourage safety in your remote teams:

  1. Don’t let your first response to an idea be no. Instead, ask them if they can build a case for it.
  2. Don’t treat mistakes as a failure. Treat them as a learning opportunity.
  3. Create formal feedback loops within your team. Allow them to suggest improvements that can be made and actually listen and act upon them
  4. Make sure you have enough contact time. You have to have some sort of relationship with someone before you can trust them and you can’t have relationship without spending time together.

6. Provide opportunities for Growth and Development.

Lack of employee development opportunities can stifle talent and reduce motivation. Studies show that 74% of workers feel their potential is limited due to inadequate development opportunities.

However, this can be more challenging for remote teams due to the lack of in-person interaction or training.

To help solve this issue, managers should consider having virtual training and professional development initiatives. You can also make use of e-learning platforms and in-person courses to help encourage self-paced learning, ensuring your team is always evolving and growing.

How to provide growth and development opportunities for remote teams: 

  1. Create development plans and roadmaps for each employee. Ask where they want to be in 18 months and work with them to identify the skills and experience they need to acquire.
  2. Create a learning and development budget. Sometimes people need to look to external courses for development, and making sure they have a budget to support that is a quick win.
  3. Make sure they have time in their diary for development. To create a culture of development, you need to have the right conditions for it. And that means that people have time and feel like they can take time for it. Part of that is managing their workload and creating ring-fenced time for it.
  4. Set up internal processes for knowledge sharing. Create monthly team training sessions where the team will share skills and information.

7. Leverage Management Tools.

Getting clarity on how each remote team member is performing is essential. The growth of remote and hybrid working has led to the increased development of online tools that help managers get actionable insights into how their teams perform.

This kind of software is set to become a standard within remote businesses, with a survey of remote work by PwC finding that “60% of executives plan to prioritise spending on tools for virtual collaboration and training for remote managers.”

To leverage team management tools for a remote team, first pinpoint what you want to use it for and the data that want to be able to measure.

That should give you a baseline to pick the right tool.

Once you’ve got the right tool onboard, it’s about looking at what traits make a good team for your organisation and pinpointing the metrics that you can measure that against.

Once you’ve got a baseline for this, you can start to get an overall view of this across the organisation and at a team level to track and measure how they are performing.

How to leverage remote team management tools:

  1. Get benchmarks across the whole organisation to understand which teams are outliers and need support.
  2. Identify behaviours across top-performing teams and develop best practices around them.
  3. Create dashboards to track performance over time.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, building a high-performance remote team necessitates an in-depth and considered approach, best summarised in these seven actionable tips:

  • Set Clear Expectations
  • Foster Effective Communication
  • Promote Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
  • Monitor Performance for Continuous Improvement
  • Cultivate Trust and Psychological Safety
  • Provide Opportunities for Growth and Development
  • Leverage Management Tools

Each of these steps requires commitment from both management and team members. They should be continually refined based on feedback and changing circumstances. Embracing these strategies can ensure a successful, high-performance remote team that consistently delivers outstanding results, thus propelling business growth in the digital age.