Remote work is not foreign to most companies since it's an initiative some businesses have been offering to their employees to offer relief from the stress of commuting, encourage work-life balance and boost morale. However, if you and your team have recently begun to work remotely either full- or part-time, you must be wondering how you're going to keep everyone on track for productivity and overall success.
The transition to remote and the return to on-premise work should be seamless and smooth, so as not to cause unnecessary stress to everyone involved. The team dynamics should never be interrupted, same with the flow and the quality of work. If you're looking for a bit of inspiration and motivation, we bring you 6 remote leadership tips for your business success.
Common challenges in remote work
Your team is composed of moving parts, each component responsible for the group’s success or failure, and their contributions can be affected by stress, changes, and challenges that are not addressed properly. Although change is inevitable, you want to keep it manageable so productivity is not affected. The first step to being triumphant over challenges is to distinguish what those are.
Apart from doing your due diligence in researching what potential problems you might run into when starting remote work, set aside time to ask your teams. If they're struggling and finding it difficult to cope, they will open up to you and let you know what stumbling blocks they encounter with remote work. Some of those may be:
● Supervision (too much or lack thereof)
● Insufficient access to tools and information
● Isolation
● Distractions
● Demotivation
Best remote leadership tips
Don't let the downsides or problems with remote work defeat you or your team. After sitting down with them and brainstorming as a team on the difficulties with remote work, it's time to come up with solutions. Working remotely gives you unique issues so you need to be a little more creative in working around and through them.
These solutions and tips also require commitment and dedication from your team so make sure you all come to some form of agreement. There's no clear-cut remote leadership model or remote leadership training. It all depends on any particular member of your team. Here are 6 tips that can help you lead your team to victory even while one or all of you is working remotely.
1. Communicate
The first of our remote leadership tips is to communicate. If you're consistent with daily check-ins and huddles, make sure you carry this through while working remotely because that's when your presence is needed the most. Keeping in touch with everyone in your team bridges the distance and makes remote work less lonely. You can talk about team statistics, deadlines, and deliverables or you can have quick one-on-one chats just to see how they're doing personally. The important thing is to keep everyone's efforts aligned to achieve your goals and yourself available to anyone and everyone in your team.
Improve your remote leadership and visibility with Bitrix24's impressive and reliable communication tools. With HD video conferencing, super clear audio and real-time instant messaging it will be as though you're in the bullpen with the rest of your team. Make your catch-ups more personal and authentic with the help of Bitrix24.
2. Set and manage expectations
You would be remiss to assume your team knows what they're supposed to be doing at all times, even when they're working remotely. Before you even get started on remote assignments, give your team their marching orders. To be precise, set your expectations with them and theirs with you. Include this in your list of remote leadership tips. This provides you with a clear picture of what each party wishes to see and get from the other in relation to the work that needs to be done.
Then, make sure that expectations are managed. Provide guidelines, set boundaries, and touch base on the basics to make sure you're getting off on the right foot. Check their access to tools and files and make sure they have all the resources they need to deliver and perform as expected.
3. Collaborate
Isolation is another key challenge in remote work. Oftentimes, we tend to feel disconnected from the rest of the world, even our work world, when working from the confines of our homes and feel like we're working by ourselves. Our remote leadership tips include collaboration with everyone in your team and other departments as well as external contributors. Nurture and enhance the spirit of teamwork and camaraderie by collaborating well and often.
Bitrix24 makes this possible for you and your team with a central and easily-accessible receptacle for every document and file that may be needed in your day-to-day with Bitrix24.Drive. Check and recheck access rights to make sure everyone who needs to is able to make updates online, even at the same time. Integrations are also available with Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and more!
4. Focus on the output
A lot of managers as so set on tracking their team's real-time work, checking in to make sure everyone's doing what they're supposed to, and keeping track of productivity. What should be the priority is the final result, the quality of the output.
Our remote leadership tips include focusing on the output. It's important that the quality of the work and the timeliness do not suffer even when you're not all working in the same place. Keep an eye out for missed deadlines or shoddy work results and make sure you coach on these as soon as possible. You want to make your team feel that you trust them and give them enough leeway to go about their deliverables at their own pace and process but the end result is your purview. This part of the workflow should never be compromised.
5. Track progress
It's always nice to know how you're doing, where you're headed, and where you're supposed to be. Also, it's never helpful when you catch errors at the last minute like missed deadlines only after the deadline has passed. Part of effective remote leadership is being on top of everything by acting as the chief overseer without hovering so you can see the bigger picture and coach everyone to succeed more effectively.
You can do all this with Bitrix24's project planning and management software. You can closely monitor the start and end dates of projects, tasks, and checklists as well as supervise efficiency, timeliness, and create templates for recurring tasks or workflows. With Bitrix24, you also have access to comprehensive task reports for better coaching.
6. Be a mentor
Not every leader will admit this but most, if not all, of them aspire to be more of a mentor than a manager. Being a manager denotes authority, yes, but it does not often inspire admiration. If your legacy is more of a mentor, you will leave an indelible mark in the lives on those you've helped for many years to come. Being a manager, for some, means overseeing the team's performance, coaching, and producing results.
Our remote leadership tips encourage you to be a mentor. Being a mentor means setting your people up for success and guiding them to the path to actual and long-lasting success. A mentor usually imparts what they know to their direct reports, explaining their method and demonstrating the desired output. Mentors coach on behavior and attitude, dedication, and commitment more than the actual numbers.
Bonus: Make it fun!
Whether you're steadily working remotely or transitioning to reporting in the office, remember to make things fun – the bonus out of our remote leadership tips. Throw a pizza party – remote or actual – by making use of delivery and online payment services. Once you have everyone back in the office, commemorate the occasion by having a potluck or a team lunch.
While you're at it, remember to make daily drudgeries more lively by praising wins and successes, no matter how small they may be. Set aside some of your team meetings scheduled and do a trivia hour with your team or a fun game. Whatever you come up with, don't forget the key word: FUN.
The tip of it
Managing a team is never easy and working remotely puts added pressure and stress on everything. Thankfully, you don't have to go it alone. You can make things more manageable for you and the rest of your team with our remote leadership tips and Bitrix24.
Bitrix24 has all the tools that you may need to manage your business remotely. Give your team the freedom to take their work and produce great results anywhere with Bitrix24 whether you need mobile CRM, task and project management, communications, internal social network and so much more. Sign up for free and experience the difference with Bitrix24.
