The First 5 Steps to Take if Your Team Just Went Remote

As parts of the U.S. emerge from the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, people and businesses everywhere are adjusting to a “new normal” that includes some aspects of social distancing. During the peak of the crisis, most businesses have had to cease operations at their workplaces for some length of time, with many workplaces still shut down indefinitely.

If your team was fortunate, you were able to transition your members to remote positions. However, the transition may have been rushed and if your team did not have a remote work from home (WFH) process set up, then there has likely been a lot of trial and error.

Each company is going to be different, but minimizing the time to effective and efficient remote work will allow your team to boost results while feeling much more comfortable with the new normal. Try these top five TEAM tips to get your team set up for long term success:

1. Change your managerial mentality - focus on results, not time

Remote work, especially in the form of WFH, requires a bit more schedule flexibility. If you, as a manager, focus on having 'butts in seats' from 9:00am - 5:00pm, then your team will burn out and bail. Instead, focus your managerial style on being task and project oriented.

Establish tasks and their due dates, then let your team complete those tasks whenever they want, as long as they meet their deadlines and retain a high quality of output. For those worried about not being able to sync with their team enough, allow for work to be completed according to the employee's schedule but look to block out about 2 hours a day where all employees have to be around so that any meetings or team updates that need to happen can be done during that time.

My top tool for helping to implement a task-oriented mindset is the task and project management software, Asana. Asana is easy to pick up and helps you assign, delegate, and manage tasks efficiently. For a more robust tool that combines task management, time-tracking, and more, I would suggest ClickUp. Its learning curve is a little longer, but it is great for teams that have rigorous, repeatable processes they need to follow and a handful of contractors or team members that need to track their time accurately and assign them to specific tasks.

2. Hone in on your team's communication

Communication across your team (both from managers to employees as well as between employees) is even more important now than it was before. With teams going remote, your organization's culture is now firmly anchored in its communication. When considering team communication, consider the amount, tone, and frequency of your communication, as well as the channels you are utilizing.

As a manager, encourage a lot of communication, and reward those employees who are proactive in communicating early and often. Proactive communication avoids problems and misunderstandings which allows work to be completed more efficiently.

As a remote manager, it is also your responsibility to be overly positive. Why? Communication can be more easily misconstrued via remote channels, and employees receive feedback better when they feel informed and appreciated. Plus, that positivity will be a big boost for team morale and culture.

So what are the channels that your team can utilize for establishing a healthy remote communication structure? As most people are now familiar, Slack or its competitor Microsoft Teams are good places to start for creating one central hub for all company communications. Slack allows not only for public channels for your organizational teams to communicate openly, but it also allows for private direct-message communications as well.

Beyond Slack, there are two more important tools to consider - a video conferencing platform like Zoom.us for both team meetings and client-facing meetings, and a video recording tool like Loom which is a great way for team members to quickly communicate their project updates or illustrate a question they have by recording a video of their screen with voiceover.

3. Define your team's new processes

Even before our rapid shift to WFH, many small businesses have not defined their business processes well. Not only is process definition part of the necessary step to scaling any small organization to a medium or large one, but it is even more important for remote teams.Business process definition leads to more efficient work and clarifies responsibilities and timelines.

Define your team's remote process, then lead your team to execute on it flawlessly. By pushing your team to follow a well established process, you, as a manager, don't have to rigorously review everything your team does because the expectations are set and the team knows how to execute their process effectively.

There are a few good process mapping tools out there, with Lucid Chart being the most popular tool for creating workflow and process visualizations. The most practical approach would be to use a process mapping tool for your management team and to translate those processes into checklists in your company's task management tool for your employees to use for each new project or task.

4. Encourage your team to pursue a hobby outside of work hours

Burnout is still a problem for remote work! With a lack of physical separation between work and home, anyone who doesn't make work-life balance a priority will find themselves sucked into a miserable cycle of never ending work. So, to keep your team working efficiently and to ensure the wellbeing of your team, actively encourage them to make work-life balance a priority. In the end, your employees will love you for it and they will come back to work each day feeling refreshed.

5. Be more efficient with your time by automating those time-sucking tasks

Automation tools were already a topic of discussion for many non-remote organizations, but now that you've gone remote you've started to see just how much time you waste on small, repetitive tasks. Keeping in mind that the new focus of work is not time in the office but tasks completed, it's a good idea to eliminate as much of those menial tasks as possible. You'd be surprised how many tasks and operations can be automated using tools like Zapier, automate.io, and AutoPilotHQ.

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These are the first 5 steps I would take to boost the efficacy of my remote team. If you enjoyed this article, bookmark remote-tips.com so you can check out more PRO and TEAM tips in the future. Subscribe to get email notifications for new articles and resources as they become available.