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Mar 5, 2020

How to effectively manage remote employees

  • Connect and support people

    • There are right and wrong ways to manage remote employees

    These days, many businesses around the world wouldn’t think twice about the logistics behind conducting a meeting with some people in one room, one person in another country, and another working from home. Modern software from TeamViewer has bridged the gap between office managers and remote workers. Team leaders must have the skills and know-how to manage remote employees in order to keep everything running smoothly, regardless of someone’s physical location.

    The need to manage remote workers is increasing for several different reasons, including:

    • Freelancers preferring to work from home or a café
    • Some employees needing to keep working on business trips
    • The talent pool in your area might not be good enough, so hiring remote workers is necessary
    • Companies offering mobile office as an extra incentive for current employees

    How to manage remote employees without running into any issues

    One of the best tips for managing remote employees is to make sure to maintain regular and in-depth communication throughout the working week. Regardless of whether you’re talking to freelancers or an employee, ensuring that everyone is in the loop is the simplest way to keep productivity high, reduce mistakes and meet deadlines. When employees feel motivated, creative, and aware of everything that’s necessary, it makes it far easier for team leaders to manage remote workers.

    Of course, good intentions are nothing without the means to actually accomplish them. When it comes to managing remote workers, a toolkit will help everyone complete their tasks quickly and efficiently. The first of these tools would have to be conference call function from TeamViewer.

    Emailing and instant messaging certainly have their place in the office and remove many of the challenges of managing remote employees, but in order to really connect a team, a video call helps everyone get on the same page in real time. Questions get answered and problems get solved when you can see and hear those you’re managing.

    The second way to manage remote workers in a productive and helpful manner is via the use of TeamViewer’s screensharing function. This means that even when a team is based all over the country – or even the world – a manager can quickly run through a project briefing on their own screen and let everyone else see the contents while discussing the steps needed out loud. This also helps for webinars and general company meetings that remote workers may not be able to attend in person.

    Manage remote employees while fostering trust

    One thing that many remote employees worry about is if their manager doesn’t think they’re actually working, but instead at home in their pyjamas and watching TV. This is often an example brought up by remote work naysayers, but in reality, remote workers are considered far more productive than colleagues in an office. In order to prove that they deserve the right to work off-site, it seems remote workers aim high and try to keep it that way.

    Team leaders learning how to manage remote workers should be able to trust that they’ll finish their given tasks, not through micromanaging or suspicion, but through constant communication, known expectations, admiration, and of course audio and visual affirmation. This is where video calls and screensharing software can display how a remote employee is working hard, as they’ll know managers can ask at any time for the progress on a project.

    A weekly check-in at a fixed date is also a useful way to manage remote employees and keep everyone on the same page. Remember: remote workers typically want to contribute, collaborate, and connect to the team as much as managers want them to!

    Once you create an environment where remote workers feel at home as much as their colleagues in-house, then the sky really is the limit.

    Download TeamViewer now