Effective Managing Remote Teams: 6 Best Practices

According to Forbes, 98% of workers in the US have stated a desire to work remotely either full-time or part of the time. Despite plans by some companies to return to office-based work, there will be a need to make concessions in order to hire top talent. As technology develops and more work can be automated, the types of jobs that can easily be performed from anywhere will also increase. According to the World Economic Forum, there will be an increase of 25% in the number of jobs that can be done remotely by 2030.

These statistics touch upon the availability of remote work and employee preferences; however, there are financial motivations for companies to outsource work to teams in other states or countries, effectively creating a situation similar to remote work. In other words, working remotely will not disappear, although the form it takes will change. With the flexibility and potential cost savings for this arrangement come various challenges that leaders and employees alike must solve.

In this article, the Enji team will share its vision of remote teams and best practices to boost performance and cohesion within them.

This material will focus on managing remote teams; however, it is important to understand the complexities involved in this arrangement. Of course, many companies do not have 100% remote teams but rather hybrid teams, and a remote-first culture does not mean there is no physical space for employees to gather. Companies can maintain a single or several offices where employees can come to work if they are nearby, while others may work from any location they prefer.

The obvious difficulty of managing global remote teams is the time zones that everyone works in. This can create delays while a leader waits for replies to questions or when employees need to find a time for a call.

Remote work provides flexibility and saves time that was once spent on traveling to and from a workplace. However, employees at home, especially those new to remote environments, may encounter distractions if they do not organize their days properly. These include family members, chores, and easy access to entertainment.

Given the benefits offered by remote work, it may be surprising to learn that researchers have noted an increase in burnout and stress among full-time remote workers. The lack of clear, physical borders between the spaces where people work and rest reduces the distinction of being at work and off for the day. Other reasons for stress among remote workers include a perception that they should be available for longer hours to respond to communication.

If a company works in a hybrid context where part of a team is located in a single location, and others work remotely, those who are together will have more face-to-face contact than those not in the office. This is a challenge in terms of communication and team cohesiveness when remote employees feel left out.

Remote teams offer the excellent benefit of expanding the diversity of a team to include members from around the world, with different cultural backgrounds and native languages. However, this diversity can play against team cohesion if not understood properly. There could be roadblocks that prevent the team from understanding each other.

Another element of diversity, though not evident, is generational. Today, four generations are strongly represented in the workforce: Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Zoomers. The proportions may vary, and some businesses may have representatives of the generation before Baby Boomers and after Zoomers. In any case, this diversity is a potential challenge to leaders and teams as they also need to navigate differing expectations of work and communication preferences.

In spite of these are serious challenges to effective remote teamwork, overcoming them is possible with the right steps. By focusing on the causes of misunderstandings and generational and cultural communicational challenges, teams can reap the benefits of global collaboration.

Based on our team's success so far, we have developed best practices that guide our understanding of effective remote team management. Trust is at the foundation of our approach. The strategies below intersect with building and maintaining strong cohesion and trust within a team.

Discussing everyone's expectations and establishing rules for how the team communicates helps counter the challenges presented by time zones and different cultural understandings of work. Depending on the stage of a project, there are questions a team leader can ask, such as:

• What tools does everyone prefer for work and communication? What have you used before?
• What types of communication are best? How often should we communicate?
• What experience do you have working remotely? What did you like or not?
• What is the deadline for an answer to a question? (For example: 24 hours or 2 days)

If these topics are discussed before a project begins, then the team can find the best options in terms of tools and rules for working together. Making large-scale changes will be difficult for a team in the middle of a project, but adjusting communication schedules and frequency is possible. Build on the team's experience to create an effective remote working environment.

Following the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) structure is always important, and it becomes crucial with remote work. When teams are separated by distance, time, and, sometimes, language, it is essential to make all requirements, goals, and requests as specific as possible to avoid misunderstandings and costly delays or fixes.

This includes rewriting clear task instructions and descriptions, leaving comments that are easily understood, and writing messages to team members that empower them and make your expectations clear.

An important element of trust is knowing what team members are working on within the project. The Enji team follows the "all moves are recorded" approach. This does not mean a remote team manager should use a camera to record their team's physical movements. That undermines trust. Instead, this approach emphasizes that teams keep records of what they do:

• Submitting stand-ups with plans and roadblocks
• Writing comments for tasks with questions and updates
• Leaving worklogs for tasks with details of what was done
• Creating artifacts for projects, such as code and documents

This data is created manually by the team, while other data, such as changing task status or creating commits, etc, can be recorded automatically with the right tools. The question of how to track the productivity of remote employees requires a solution that does not intrude on the privacy of an individual but ensures they are accountable for their work. Effective monitoring reduces micromanagement and records where time goes so that teams can be transparent to stakeholders and clients.

Transparent project management for remote teams through transparency can also be helped by hosting AMA sessions. These are perhaps more appropriate for larger teams or when managing several teams. The idea is that employees can submit questions about anything to management, who will answer them during a call with team members.

Embrace everything remote work gives teams and companies. It is not the same as working in the office for a reason, so it is time to apply new approaches and innovations. Consider Enji, for example, and what it offers teams. Instead of arranging video calls for live stand-ups and other status checks, Enji lets employees submit written, asynchronous stand-ups. No one needs to wake up early or think of something that makes them happy on the spot, and the texts are saved for future reference and analysis by Enji's AI features. Here are some examples of automation:

• Workflows that automatically move tasks from status to status and send notifications
• Bots that ping team members about inactive tasks
• Alerts on employee time reports, such as overtime or undertime

Every automated step is time a remote team manager saves for strategic planning and guidance.

The Enji team values the all-moves recorded approach and automation because they create data that leaders can use to understand their teams in a previously impossible way. Before, performance monitoring or reviews required interfering with employees' work by asking them for interviews or reports. Through AI-powered data analysis, leaders can:

• Identify burnout
• See where employees perform well or where they need support
• Plan workflows and schedules that fit employee rhythms

Performance is more than great margins and meeting deadlines. Low performance can indicate that a team lacks cohesiveness or that an employee does not feel good about their work or contribution to the project. Data shows leaders the signals of poor employee health so that they can take targeted steps to guide employees and teams to solutions that boost individual performance and team productivity.

The best practices above are possible and easy to follow with the right project management and time management tools for remote teams. Select instruments and platforms that allow teams to automate tasks, share information, and provide data that can be analyzed. Enji integrates with task managers and messaging platforms to collect a team's data in one place.

Enji was born at Mad Devs to create more transparency in software development that enhanced team cohesion, gave managers more time to spend on important tasks, and built better client relationships. Transparency and trust are at the heart of the product; that's why our team helps companies like Clutch.co embed those values into the workflow. Enji supports remote and hybrid teams to perform better with:

• Asynchronous stand-ups that are submitted to a bot
• Customized alerts and reminders to save time and keep teams on track
• Automated reports that keep team leaders informed without meetings
• Data collection based on a team and individual activity

Concise text reports and summaries that can be quickly shared with top-level management, clients, and other stakeholders