Covid-19 came with so much impact on the way startups and other businesses were, one of the long-standing effects of covid-19 was lock-down across most countries around the world.
The lockdown forced so many companies to adopt full-time working options for their employee.
Lockdown has been relieved in almost every country but the idea of l remote work has been adopted by the majority of startups across the globe.
As a startup in its early stage, it can be pretty difficult to manage your team members scattered across different locations, especially if you don’t have the right skills and knowledge to ensure every team member does what is expected of them to achieve results.
In this article, we are focusing on You can manage a team of people working across different locations in the world.
For any working environment to flourish, having social bonds and mutual trust between employees is important. Here are some simple tips you can implement today to build a collaborative team who are apart but together.
1. Set Clear Expectations
Just because you don’t work from the office, it does not mean you should not have working hours and expectations.
It is important to set clear expectations for your employee.
There are a couple of questions you need to ask to set work expectations and policies:
- What are work hours/time zone expectations?
- Can people work from anywhere?
- Which communication channels (email, Slack, Asana message, video) are used for what purpose?
- What work-from-home office equipment do employees have to buy?
2. Focus on communication
Building a company culture within a remote team is a difficult task.
However, by maximizing communication, you can create an atmosphere which reduces all barriers faced by a remote team.
Talk to the team as much as possible; and encourage them to talk but avoid unnecessary meetings.
3. Keep track of tasks
If you are not yet using project management tools for your whole team, compare a few and start using one!
When working remotely, it gets difficult to keep track of not only your own tasks and also coordinate project timelines with your team.
4. Keep track of team progress
Keep track of the progress your team makes as regards each task,
meaning they should be logging time and you should be able to access daily and weekly reports of each team member
whenever you want to track task progress.
5. Organise weekly reviews
Use any video conferencing tool of your choice for daily or weekly updates (standups) to discuss
what each team member did a day before and what they are planning to do today.
This will keep everyone on the team accountable.
Note avoid long meetings as it might affect the productivity of team members, as an alternative,
opt for short text updates on a dedicated channel that would substitute video standup.
Conclusion
To sum up, a remote environment requires totally different set of rules to those that would normally apply to working in an office environment.
Remote work requires a lot of self-discipline and dedication as well as frequent communication among team members.
Sometimes you might need to set up/pay for a workspace for your team member instead of working directly from their houses.
You can book a state-of-the-art workspace, for your team here