In this article, I want to share with you three things that I consider essential in successfully managing remote teams, whether they are teams of volunteers or external employees.
#1 – Communication
Keeping in touch with your remote team is the key to success. Managing an external team presents some challenges that you don't face when leading an internal team. Many leadership tactics that you can apply with in-house teams don't work with external teams, even simple things like walking to their desk to say "hello" and checking on them is complicated.
Properly handling communication with your remote team becomes more important than ever. There are three points I think that take a higher priority:
Instant messaging – personally, I really love Slack because it allows you to talk in private as well to a group of people, as well as create special channels for very specific topics. Being active on this communication channel not only for work-related things but also for team activities could be very beneficial for your remote team.
Regular calls – when possible, try to have a one-on-one update via video calls with your team members; it's very important to move away from impersonal chat, email, and the project management tool.
Newsletters – sending regular updates to your team members is an easy way to keep everyone informed about what is going on in the company, what goals have been achieved, and what tasks are coming up. I'll talk more about this topic in another article in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
#2 – Organization
One of the more complex challenges you have to face when dealing with a remote team is organizing the different tasks and splitting up work among the team members.
Now that the internet has had such a big impact on people's lives, with so many applications out there, there's a high risk of using the wrong tools to organize work. While emails and instant messengers are good for keeping information at a high level, they're not really the right tool for monitoring task progress or planning upcoming content.
Using a project management tool could save a lot of time and make things easier for your team. Our team uses Teamwork. It's quite a simple tool that allows us to plan and organize our work in an easy, structured way to maximize the productivity of our remote team and keep track of all deliverables.
Having a precise structure also simplifies the work of our external team, as they also have a better overview of the workload and they can organize themselves accordingly. It has a big impact on reducing their stress levels and increasing their motivation, so don't underestimate it.
#3 – Training
It's true that training employees costs time and money, but there are so many benefits to training employees that it's worth the investment. This is even more the case when you're talking about remote workers who may feel detached from the company. Offering a professional training program will make them happier, more motivated, valued, and always up-to-date with the market's best practices.
At Travian Games, we started a training program for our Community Managers called Travian Academy in January 2019. After evaluating many platforms, we decided to use Talentlms which fits all our needs and we can highly recommend it.
So far, we have nine courses to cover the most important topics (and more are being developed).
The courses contain the following elements:
A video about the topic, where the most fundamental part is explained (a transcript is also available).
An introduction test to evaluate whether the basics have been understood. This test is automatically evaluated by the system.
A practical assignment to transfer the acquired knowledge to the relevant community. The assignment is evaluated by a Team Lead.
After the course is completed, the participant receives a certificate that also boosts the motivation of many people.
Using a training platform helps you also to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of your remote team. This can enable you to connect remote workers with each other so that the strengths are shared within the team and they can support each other.
Do you think this content is interesting? Would you like to read more about remote team management?
Leave a comment on this article and share the topic you're interested in. I'll be glad to share my expertise with you.
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