How to Handle Your Team Remotely & Not Get Nervous Breakdown

The quarantine has done its job – even when it is over in many countries, the number of employees working from home has grown so much that many of them would love to remain stay-at-home specialists. To be precise, nearly 80 to 90% of all professionally active folks would like to work at home at least a few days a week.

So, we need to take it as a given that remote teams are the new norm of today. This has even improved the economy by much: employees widened their talent pool beyond the local and started to seek foreign staff to include in their teams, have gone online, and even organised dedicated offices in many cities. 

While having it as a widely accepted form of work, we still need to learn how to lead remote teams effectively. This idea is quite complex in nature and includes many factors. In this article, we are about to highlight them and suggest the ways in which you can apply our tips in your remote working environment.

Leading and Organising Remote Team Work: 5 Top Advice for Productivity and Engagement 

If you are having a hard time trying to order up the working process, schedule things, and get every project done in time, with a remote team it can be a serious challenge. Sometimes when the crew doesn’t get together, they lose the team spirit and communication. 
Still, it is possible to deal with all of this with the help of specific tools aimed at increasing your progress and maintaining healthy and unified company culture.

Tip #1. Be clear about your expectations.

For goals to be achieved, they must be expressed distinctly and explicitly. As a leader, define the exact requirements for attendance of team meetings, working hours, key projects, deadlines, and so on. Break tasks into comprehensible parts that are easy to accomplish and don’t create stress. 

Tell your team which projects are of paramount importance right now and which of them can wait. For example, mark the tasks which can wait with a different colour if you use a planning or task managing app. Colours and signs can be used in many planning programs such as Slack and Asana. Base your evaluation of tasks’ priority on the famous 4 quadrants of time management that you can see below and encourage the team to adopt this method. 
 

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Be caring and respective about employees’ personal time too. Don’t let work consume all of their lives. A good trick is to use the same apps to track working time and not allow overwork to take place.

Tip #2. Choose reliable CRM systems.

Thanks to the web, you can work on one assignment simultaneously. Yet, not all instruments for teamwork are equally great. Choose such tools that allow workers to keep in touch, share access to files, and manage assignments. 

This may interest you: Digital Tools You Need to be a Productivity Machine

To be resultative and accomplish key projects, find a good CRM system such as, for example, Workzone that lets you easily distribute tasks and track progress. Asana is another widely loved tool for smart planning, communication, and project work which in addition includes integration of Pinterest, Airbnb, and Uber. 

Other top collaboration tools include:

• Slack

A great solution for having business messaging, making voice and video calls, automating work routines, and integrating other apps. Basically, Slack is the network just for your team.

• Google Drive

One can’t think of a better tool for storage and collaborative editing. Google Drive is excellent for teams of any size, it is reliable thanks to secure cloud storage, and is perfect for managing files on multiple devices.

• Trello

Here you can create boards for separate projects, assign team members to complete them, and manage tasks in a full and colourful way. 

• Miro 

Miro is cool for the lovers of visuals. While often being used as a whiteboard and platform for webinars, it allows a range of other features like brainstorming, screen sharing, getting feedback in a lot of engaging ways, managing access to accounts, and the exclusive mouseover collaboration.

Tip #3. Think of corporate security.

Although many of the tools we have enlisted offer password management, you might want to consider a one-purpose instrument to grant security. Norton 360 is a popular choice for work environments as it boasts a strong firewall and super convenient team use, or you can also use free VPNs. To be precise, this firewall blocks any threats like malware, checks for information leaks, and works as a filter for any other suspicious intrusion. 

When a whole team has one Norton 360 mobile app and can manage privacy reports, wifi security, and scanning with this one tool, it saves a lot of time and effort. Shared access to files and easy backup lets any business benefit from the use. 

Be free to check out other business software to bring variety and choose the tools everyone on the team will like.

Tip #4. Put a strong emphasis on visual content.

As mentioned before, visuals are the best for getting and keeping workmates engaged and lose focus for a longer period of time. Whenever you need to explain anything to them or upgrade their skills, use videos! 

If you don’t need the whole video or want to stop at a specific part, cut or trim it with the help of Movavi Video Converter. In the same way, this tool can be used for a variety of content operations including video compressing, adding subtitles, screen recording, converting videos to other formats, or making appealing slideshow presentations. 

When speaking of great visuals, we can't help but mention Canva – a design tool incorporating massive options for visual content – infographics, social media posts, posters, logos, etc. Any information blended with a bit of creativity will surely be remembered better than long lines of text or boring slides.
 

Another great tool our team have been using is Colorcinch. It is a great tool to instantly create, edit and turn your photos into artwork.  It is an extremely easy way to get your photos into cartoons too, which is extremely visually engaging.  

Tip #5. Create a flexible schedule.

No, this never means that the timetable should not be fixed. You just need to be aware of your remote employees’ most productive time and make limits less strict. For instance, start the business day at noon, not at the harsh 8 a.m. 

Make sure that the business day is convenient for everyone to stay in touch. Working on holidays or their birthdays (because why not?) is out of the question too. What is more, it can show your sincere appreciation and build a culture where every team member is valued. To do, even more, consider making employee’s birthdays their day off. 

Ancillary reading: Timeboxing – the Ultimate Productivity Tool

And, following our tradition, here is the tool for building up great schedules in case you need one – Calendy. Its schedules are so irresistibly cute and easy to make that your team will love it at once. Plus, you can integrate with your fav apps and save time on mundane operations. These apps include PayPal, Zoom, Stripe, etc. 

Conclusion

Remote work can be quite enjoyable and fruitful even though it is much different from the traditional bricks-and-mortar offices that we are so used to. Yet, becoming more productive is a process so don’t be too strict with team members (and yourself) as you manage your team and establish a supportive working environment. 

Put yourself in their shoes: treat them with genuine respect and you will see the same attitude toward you. Current times have shown that mutual respect and understanding not only makes a team more cohesive but changes the whole working atmosphere. 

Also, be specific with your goals, use smart tools for keeping in touch and collaborating, and actually be a part of this team. Nothing will work better than your genuine interest, respect, and involvement in the process. 

Remote working can be a challenge especially when we have no choice but to stay home. However, there are so many things that can be done to mitigate the consequences! For instance, let me introduce this app Happily (or Budaya for those from Indonesia) is an amazing engagement app built for organisations to drive engagement amongst employees. It has amazing analytics and also provides activities for employees to be fully immersed in the organisation's culture and values. To find out more, click here or email info@leaderonomics.com

Check out the media below to unravel all the fun with your colleagues simultaneously stroke your inquisitiveness!