This article provides best practices for managing remote teams that GPSG’s Cyber Team is sharing with our partners in light of the increasing shift to remote workforces for business continuity. A rapid transition can lead to miscommunication between managers and employees that impacts company and employee productivity. For more information see GPSG’s Best Practices for Managing Remote Teams here.
Effective communication techniques and methods are foundational for managing your most critical assets—your employees—during any remote workforce management program.
Proactively driving communications, taskings, and building trust with your virtual team can measurably impact business objectives and operations.
How are you communicating with your remote team?
As the team leader, your team members will look to you to establish and follow any communications guidelines or boundaries that you choose to set. This helps establish trust, respect, and transparency among team members.
Here are some ideas for communicating with your remote team:
- Use a collaboration platform
- Offer virtual “open” office hours
- Facilitate a regularly scheduled video call
- Set response expectations
Cultivate a culture of accountability to drive projects forward
As a leader, creating a vision for tackling hard problems and getting your team excited about it is only half of your job. You must also set tasking deadlines and enforce them.
Seek to establish repeatable processes that do not stifle innovation, yet hold team members accountable. Show your team the value in communicating issues before a missed project deadline.
For example, if you don’t use one already, select a task management tool and require your team to regularly use it. This provides transparency in workloads and allows you to more easily assign new projects.
Trust is essential for leading a successful remote team
When employees don’t trust organizational leadership their chances of being engaged are one in 12. If you don’t see your employees everyday how can you build a trusting relationship with them?
This can be challenging, however consistency and fairness can go a long way in growing the employee-manager relationship, even in disparate work environments. Here are some ideas for growing trust with your remote team:
- Review your management style, reach out to mentors and coaches that you trust for feedback
- Clarify expectations and provide feedback
- Provide materials and information that your team members need to perform their jobs
- Hold one-on-one meetings with individual team members
- Admit when you don’t know the answers
These are only few tips for managing remote teams. We recommend that you try different approaches to determine what ultimately will work best for you and your team as you identify remote team building opportunities. For more information see GPSG’s Best Practices for Managing Remote Teams here.
Contact GPSG at cyberteam@gpsg.co for a free consultation on setting up and protecting remote workforces from cyber threats.
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