With companies all over the world being plunged into the world of remote work, there’s no better time to brush up on your knowledge of how to manage a remote team.
Managing remote teams can be tricky.
There are fundamental differences in managing remote teams compared to a team in your office.
You have less face-to-face time, less overview of how projects are progressing, and need to trust your team to get the job done.
However, just because your team is remote doesn’t mean they’re at home watching Netflix or falling behind on projects.
According to recent data, 30.82% of businesses reported that shifting to remote work enhanced their overall performance.
If you are managing remote teams correctly, your team will be happy, productive, and get results.
In this article, I will walk you through significant benefits, challenges, and best practices for managing remote teams.
By the end, you’ll have a list of takeaways you can test and implement in your company.
Let’s jump into the guide.
Managing remote teams means leading, organizing, and guiding a group of people who work from different locations. It’s like being the captain of a virtual ship!
In today’s tech-driven world, remote team management has become commonplace, allowing companies to tap into talent from all over. From email software for remote teams to virtual conference tools, companies have numerous options for managing remote teams. But hey, it’s not all smooth sailing.
It’s about creating open lines of communication, promoting teamwork, and keeping everyone motivated, even when you can’t high-five in person. Effectively managing remote teams for customer service is vital for achieving quick response times and consistent service quality.
You’ll need some nifty tech tools, clear guidelines, and a strong team spirit. The key is to empower individuals while building a sense of togetherness to achieve those shared goals.
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If you’re apprehensive about your team working from home, stop.
Your team may be out of sight (except on video calls), but that doesn’t mean they won’t be working.
In fact, according to a recent report by Hubstaff, remote workers spend an average of 4.55 hours in focused work every day, while office workers spend only 3.72 hours. That’s because remote workers experience 18% fewer interruptions compared to office workers.
Image via Hubstaff
Remote work will also make your team happier, and their productivity levels may even increase as they can more easily manage their work-life balance.
Allowing your team to work remotely comes with the following benefits:
A remote work environment opens the doors to a global talent pool. In fact, 41% of business professionals stated that one of the top reasons for adopting remote work was to expand their talent pools.
With virtual teams, you’re no longer limited to hiring within your geographical location. You can recruit the best candidates, regardless of their location.
This translates to stronger, more diverse teams with a wider range of skills and perspectives. Empowering your remote team with customer support tools can further streamline response times and improve customer satisfaction.
With remote employees distributed across different time zones, your customer service operations can run around the clock. Instead of asking local team members to work during odd hours, you can rotate shifts naturally across time zones.
It’s a great way to ensure someone is always online and ready to help customers, even on weekends and holidays. While you may be tempted to use AI chatbots during odd hours, there are some crucial customer service skills that AI can’t replace.
Managing remote teams effectively will help maximize business productivity while improving customer satisfaction levels.
Managing remote teams eliminates the need for office space, furniture, utilities, and on-site perks like coffee machines or free snacks. This reduces expenses, resulting in higher cost savings. Statistics show that 30.59% of business owners attribute lower overhead costs to remote work.
Managing remote teams well can result in even more savings that you can allocate to other projects. For instance, you can invest in the best customer service email software to improve resolution times and enhance the customer experience.
Remote work supports flexible working hours, better work-life balance, and increased independence. Plus, workers can work from any location, so they don’t have to commute every day.
As a result, most remote workers are satisfied with their jobs, with 92% of them saying that this work setup has improved their mental health.
Image via We Work Remotely
Happier and less stressed employees are less likely to seek opportunities elsewhere, leading to higher retention rates and a more stable workforce.
With a remote customer service team, you can scale safely and quickly adapt to market changes, seasonal peaks, or unexpected surges in customer inquiries.
You can easily recruit part-time, freelance, or contractual remote workers without worrying about desk space or office infrastructure. Plus, solutions like customer service email analytics software provide insights into workload and agent performance, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly.
However, this doesn’t mean managing remote teams doesn’t come with challenges.
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Working from home is very different from working in an office. Sure, the flexibility is great, and you’re no longer bound by geography when hiring. However, that freedom also comes with a whole new set of hurdles.
Managing remote teams scattered across time zones can pose several coordination and cohesion challenges. Here are several challenges you’ll need to overcome if you have a remote team:
When you first start managing remote teams, you’ll realize that you need clearly defined processes for communication in place.
Without face-to-face contact, effective team communication becomes even more critical. Without protocols in place, communication between remote working teams can be disjointed and confusing.
Plus, non-verbal cues like body language and tone are often lost in written messages, leaving more room for misinterpretation.
Managing remote teams effectively requires using communication tools like Slack, Hangouts, or email software for remote teams.
Image via Slack
The key here is to encourage long-form, clearly articulated messages over short-form messages.
If your remote working team takes time to put their thoughts into coherent memos, they won’t need to rely on implied meanings or lose the core of their messages in unclear chat logs.
When your team goes remote, their schedules may end up changing slightly.
People’s real-life responsibilities, such as childcare, pet care, or general errands, sometimes need to occur during regular work hours.
That’s normal.
To get around the varying schedules, we’d recommend scheduling a daily stand-up call (or asking people to send a message in Slack) where your remote working team shares what they’ve been working on, their plans, and if there’s anything they need help with.
This means that everyone stays on the same page, and people have the flexibility to manage their time as they see fit.
It may feel unnatural initially. However, as long as your remote team has access to the right customer service solutions and communication platforms, you can trust them to complete the work.
Working from home doesn’t mean results and progress will slow.
Setting goals is one of the most crucial steps for managing remote teams. It ensures remote employees stay motivated.
However, these need to be results-based.
Sit down (virtually) with your remote working team and create plans for the coming quarter.
Set goals based on business results for your team to work towards. For example, if your goal is to enhance email communication and support, you can prioritize email marketing KPIs that reflect customer engagement, like open rates, click-through rates, and even response times for campaigns with customer interaction.
Then, they can get down to work and hit the targets you set.
Avoid using tools that track your employees’ time to the minute or take screenshots of their work at intervals throughout the day. Your remote team won’t feel trusted, and it’ll lower productivity rather than increase it.
With a results-based work environment, you won’t need to micromanage your remote working team, and they’ll be glad to see that you trust them to get their work done to a high standard.
One issue with managing remote teams is that your team members may struggle to separate their work and home life. Remote working teams often end up working more because they don’t need to waste time commuting.
If your team gets burnt out, they’ll be unmotivated and unlikely to do their best work.
To counter this, we recommend you actively encourage your remote working team to take time off and stay away from their work in the evenings and weekends, where possible.
It’s easier to prevent burnout than to recover from it.
You want everyone on your remote working team to feel included and part of something bigger.
It helps keep everyone motivated; a good culture is vital to employee retention.
A significant pain point for managing remote teams is building company culture.
There are a few ways you can approach this.
Firstly, you should be deliberate about your company culture. Don’t expect something to emerge.
Schedule weekly team catch-ups where people can discuss whatever they want. Create a Slack channel for random, off-topic chat. Set guidelines for how communication should be done.
Don’t let your culture create itself organically, and then try to change it.
A little personal connection goes a long way in managing remote teams efficiently.
In an office setting, bonding over hallway chats or lunch breaks allows you to nurture relationships and establish trust. Remote settings don’t have these spontaneous interactions, and team members might feel isolated or less connected to their colleagues.
To effectively manage remote teams and make them feel seen and valued, remote managers need to create consistent opportunities for informal interactions. For example, you can schedule casual catch-ups by running virtual coffee chats or calls.
How do you know if remote employees are productive and meeting expectations?
Unlike with an office team, you can’t just walk by their desks to see what they’ve been up to. Without the right systems in place, it’s easy to either micromanage or lose track of team performance entirely.
Managing remote teams demands shifting from monitoring activity to measuring output and impact. You can use email productivity and project management tools to track progress. On top of that, ensure each employee has well-defined KPIs that align with team and organizational objectives.
Another challenge you may face when managing remote teams is reduced morale. Remote workers miss the social aspect of an office, leading to feelings of loneliness or disconnect.
Without shared experiences like team lunches or office celebrations, it can be harder to keep people motivated and energized.
To make work feel more human and maintain high morale, you’ll need to implement creative engagement strategies. You can create virtual shared rituals like games, shoutouts, and milestone celebrations.
A little laughter can lift a lot of spirits.
No matter how organized your team is, technical issues, slow internet, or equipment malfunctions can derail productivity and cause frustration. This is especially concerning since remote employees rely on stable internet, cloud-based tools, and secure access to systems to get work done.
When managing remote teams, investing in a reliable tech stack is the key to preventing these hitches. For instance, a reliable email response management software is unlikely to cause communication breakdowns.
You can also provide IT support remotely and offer tech stipends for remote workers to upgrade their home office setups.
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It would be best if you were deliberate and prepared to manage remote teams.
Here are some best practices for managing remote teams that you should follow to ensure your company runs smoothly.
When you’re working remotely, you need to have everything done digitally. From remote email management to project tracking, digital solutions are essential for running daily operations.
Luckily, there is a vast range of tools to help you facilitate and manage remote work.
Here are some to consider:
As long as your remote team can easily collaborate, share assets, and track projects remotely, everything else will fall into place.
You must be clear about expectations when managing remote teams living in different time zones and working on various projects.
Here are some things you should consider and let your team know your expectations:
This list isn’t exhaustive, but it should help you get started.
Remember to be realistic with all of the above.
When you’re working remotely, it’s easy to lose track of projects and what’s being done.
To counter this, establish a routine on when and how your team will check in with each other (and with you) on work that’s being done.
A daily stand-up is a format that works well for this.
You may need to have multiple meetings with multiple teams.
After all, your development team doesn’t necessarily need to know what the people on your sales team are up to daily (and vice versa).
You could run an all-hands meeting with your whole team every month to ensure everyone is on the same page.
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When managing remote teams, it can be hard to create camaraderie between your team.
Consider how you can encourage interaction between your team, as it builds trust and fosters team happiness at work.
There are no rules for the best way to do this.
However, here are some ideas for inspiration:
Basically, we can’t tell you what to do here.
Your company and people are unique, and you must build a remote culture that enables people to feel good and do work they care about.
Feedback is essential for business growth, no matter where your team is located. When managing remote teams, you need to be more intentional about it. This means recognizing what your team members are doing well and offering constructive criticism in a supportive way.
Managing remote teams also becomes easier when feedback is a two-way street. So, create a work environment where your team feels comfortable giving you feedback as well.
Here are a few strategies to encourage feedback when managing remote teams:
Managing remote teams effectively begins with creating a positive first impression. A smooth start sets the tone for a new hire’s stay within your company.
On the other hand, a clunky and confusing onboarding process leaves new remote team members feeling completely lost before they’ve even started. They may also spend too much time trying to get up to speed, which translates to wasted productivity.
So, ensure new hires feel welcomed and supported. Provide them with all the information and resources they need from day one.
Here are some tips to create a seamless onboarding experience for remote employees:
When you’re not in the same room as your remote team members, poor performance can often go unnoticed until it becomes a major problem. Part of managing remote teams includes monitoring signs of underperformance, such as missed meetings, poor communication skills, missing deadlines, disengagement, and more.
Don’t wait for deadlines to pass or projects to stall before you act. Early intervention will help struggling team members get back on track before issues escalate.
Let’s take a closer look at how to approach these problems:
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While remote work offers incredible flexibility, it can also blur the lines between work and home life, leading to burnout and isolation. In fact, 17.7% of remote workers report difficulty unplugging from work, while 9% cite loneliness as a key challenge.
Managing remote teams includes checking in on how employees feel, not just the work they do.
Normalize rest, balance, and healthy boundaries. Cultivate a remote work environment where people feel comfortable taking time off and talking about their mental health challenges.
Here are several ways you can promote mental health wellness for your remote team:
When managing remote teams, you can’t just rely on verbal instructions or memory. After all, human beings can forget or make mistakes. So, you need to document everything, from processes and policies to project guidelines and meeting notes.
Ensure the necessary information is easily accessible to every remote worker. It will keep all your team members on the same page and reduce misunderstandings.
Here’s how to implement a strong documentation culture for your remote workforce:
Managing remote teams goes hand in hand with holding regular meetings. Without the right structure, virtual meetings can quickly become unproductive or disengaging.
Here are some best practices for achieving meeting objectives when managing remote teams:
Happy virtual meeting management!
Sometimes, it’s hard to create something out of nothing.
When building your remote company culture and designing a management style that lets your remote team thrive, it’s worth looking at how successful remote-first companies are managing remote teams.
Here are some valuable resources that may help you find your footing:
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1. How do you manage remote teams effectively?
Successfully managing remote teams requires the following:
2. What are the challenges of managing remote teams?
Common issues you’ll face when managing remote teams include:
3. Which communication channels are suitable for managing remote teams?
When managing remote teams, you can use tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams for instant messaging, timetoreply for managing email communications, and Zoom for video calls.
4. What are the best practices for managing remote teams when their productivity dips?
Managing remote teams with productivity issues involves having open conversations to understand the root cause, offering support and additional training, and setting short-term improvement goals.
5. How can you engage remote employees effectively?
To engage remote employees efficiently, you’ll need to check in with them frequently, encourage social interactions, provide regular feedback, and host virtual meetings and events to boost morale.
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There are no hard and fast rules for managing remote teams.
You’ll need to experiment and find what works for your unique company and situation.
The experience of going remote is entirely different from working on-site, but it can lead to enhanced productivity and happiness gains for your team.
You’ll need to ensure your remote team has the right tools for the job, and everyone needs to be on the same page.
Once you start seeing results, you’ll understand the hype behind remote work and why more and more companies are allowing their teams to work remotely around the world.
Need an easy way to support your remote team’s productivity?
Schedule a demo now and see timetoreply’s email analytics and reply time tracking tool in action.
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Head of Customer Success @ timetoreply
Barry Blassoples is the Head of Customer Success at timetoreply, where he helps customer-facing teams boost revenue and protect brand reputation by providing actionable insights to improve their business email response times. He has over 15 years of leadership experience across customer success, sales, and marketing roles in high-growth tech companies.
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