Keeping a remote workers team happy despite their location, and keeping them motivated despite the distance…
You learn so much about yourself when you start your passion project, a business that is, by all accounts, an extension of your personality. But with all the excitement of seeing your business grow from strength to strength, there are times when we can all struggle with the managerial side of things. When overseeing a remote workers team, we can struggle to keep that sense of cohesion, because everybody is dotted around the country, or even the planet. As a result, this notion of teamwork can feel very difficult to achieve. So, how can you keep your remote workers happy despite their location, but also, keep them motivated, despite the distance?
Developing Rapport
Yes, it’s much harder for you if you are trying to communicate with someone in another country, but there are small things that you can do to increase that more human approach to working. Building rapport isn’t just about giving them their daily tasks and that is it, it’s about getting to know who they are, which is more difficult in this working setup, but this is where your Skype meetings will serve you well. Using video chat as much as possible is beneficial to putting a face to the name. It’s a fact that the majority of human communication is nonverbal, you are missing out on a lot of how you can communicate more effectively with your team members. While it’s possible, if your remote workers are nearby, to take part in team building exercises, you have to be careful not to alienate the workers that are further afield. This is why something like video calls, and communication beyond dishing out the duties, will help to build rapport.
Go Beyond The Email
When you are firefighting and have strict deadlines, the temptation can be to give the information, and let them get on with it, but when you are sending messages back and forth, a lot of how you communicate yourself doesn’t come across. This is why something like emoticons or gifs are essential to modern approaches to communication. Emails are so cold and informal, that they seldom give you the opportunity to communicate yourself properly. As well as email, you may want to think about training up voice recognition software to recognize your voice better, so you can “speak” an email before you send it off. While this doesn’t completely put across your personality, it’s certainly getting there.
Create A Community
When you are managing a team of remote workers, the chances are that these other workers have never communicated with each other at all. Building up a community is a simple way to encourage everyone to think more like a team, and you can do this with group emails, but also team meetings on Skype, and you should also think about encouraging more small talk between each member of the team. This way, a community can become fully formed, where, if people have problems with certain aspects of work, they don’t always have to come to you.
Think About Their Career Paths Too
You can easily get into the swing of things where you give your employees the tasks for the day and that is it. But, they all have goals and aspirations too. By thinking about their career development, by having a more informal one on one with them once a month, you can get an idea of where they view themselves in a year, 2 years, or 5 years’ time. There are apps like Lighthouse that you can use to help them collaborate on their growth and goals, so you can always go back to their development. This means that they will respect you more for taking an active interest in their goals, but they are still progressing in the right direction, and still feel part of a team.
It’s a very difficult balance to get right when you are managing remote workers, because too little communication, they can feel isolated, but too much communication and you are eating into your productivity. And this is where you need to learn how you best manage people. Yes, you have a business that you are passionate about, but you are also managing people that have to do tasks for you, and may not share the same amount of passion, and when you are working with a limited budget, remote working may be the only option for you at this time. This is why you need to think about how you communicate with your employees but find ways to make them feel part of the team.
Overseeing A Remote Workers Team Effectively appeared first on Mompreneur Media
