5 Tips On Building A Successful Remote Team

As remote work continues to grow increasingly popular within companies, there are some pros and cons that come along with it. While working remotely gives flexibility and more productivity for workers, management has to still keep track of the workforce and ensure that workers are being productive in their remote work.

With that in mind, here are 5 tips to keep in mind when building a successful remote team:

Establish Goals

“You must first set clear goals and objectives for your remote team,” says Amber Rodriguez, a business writer at Writemyx and 1 Day 2 write. “Aligning team goals with individual employee objectives with help people in the group be more engaged, appreciative of their job(s), and see a clear path towards achieving said goals.”

Common goals in a remote team can be:

• Revenue-oriented
• Product/service-oriented, and/or
• Consumer-related

Build Trust

Trust is essential in managing a remote team. If there are one or more team members who can’t be trusted, then root them out, because having confidence in the entire workforce is vital to a successful remote working environment. That means that if one person isn’t consistently pulling their weight, other team members will notice.

With trust, not only will your team appreciate their freedom with the ability to work from anywhere, but also you – the manager – can rest assured that you don’t have to micromanage your remote workforce.

Have Clear Communication

All communications – manager to employee, employee to employee, etc. – must be transparent in a remote team. Without clear communication, it can be hard for remote workers to understand when deadlines are, what tasks need to be done, etc. No one wants to feel like they’re out of the loop.

So, with communication, be sure to utilize different avenues: email, video conferencing, phone calls, etc. Plus, you don’t have to focus all the communication on business matters – you can set a time to have icebreaker events or appreciation days with your remote workforce. 

Communication platforms such as Slack or RingCentral, allow your whole team to communicate effortlessly all in one centralized place. You can create groups, direct message team members, start video meetings, and much more.

Utilize KPI’s 

“A key performance indicator, or KPI, helps you monitor and confirm the progress of your employees,” says Jenny Darling, a project manager at Origin writings and Brit student. “It’s important because even the most well-managed team in the world can be subject to human errors. KPIs should align with quarterly and yearly goals to track the progress for each role in your company.”

When initiating KPIs, keep the following objectives in mind:

• Think back to what your goals are.
• Think about how each employee can help you reach said goals.
• Find a way to accurately track employees’ results.
• Also, track your own efforts with KPIs, and hold yourself accountable to the same standards that you expect from your employees.

Hire The Right People

Finally, you’ll need the right people to make up your remote workforce. In fact, you need hire people with the following traits: 

• Go-Getters: People who are self-starters, and run on energy and motivation to get the job done. 
• Effective Communicators: People who are able to communicate with all kinds of people – they’re essentially “social butterflies” and “people persons.” And, they know how to utilize different forms of communication – chats, emails, text messages, etc. 
• The Trustworthy: As mentioned before, all workers must be trusted, and be able to trust others. Now, that’s not to sacrifice productivity to micromanage workers to see if they’re working or not. Trust must come from effective communication and collaboration. And, management must fully vet new hires to ensure that they can be trusted to do their jobs.
• Independent: Since no one likes to be micro-managed, that means that all workers must practice working with little to no supervision. All management has to do is set some guidelines for remote workers, and then schedule regular checkups with them without taking too much of their time. 

REVA Global’s Virtual Assistants are an affordable solution to building your remote team. Integrating talented and trained Virtual Assistants on your team allows you to create scale, efficiency, and time-freedom in your business and your life.

Conclusion

As you follow these 5 tips, you’ll see that having a remote workforce takes more than just workers being at home working. To ensure success, you – the manager, or management – must focus on the basics: goal-setting, fostering trust and effective communications, have KPI’s, and hire the right talent. By following these tips, you’ll ensure an effective remote team that will serve you for many years to come.