7 Ways to Set Up Your Remote Team for Success

Remote work has been one of the main ways businesses of all types have continued to stay productive throughout the pandemic. Adjusting to the new work conditions may have been especially difficult for those who are in tune with more traditional practices.

Setting your remote team up for success in a fully online to a hybrid setting is essential in making sure that your business thrives and flourishes. This can be done in a multitude of ways.

1. Understand Your Team’s Challenges

While there are many benefits to working remotely, it isn’t exactly a walk in the park either. Different people may have different work-from-home conditions with a whole different set of challenges. 

(Pro tip: Check out these 7 Ways to Set Up Your Remote Team for Success!)

It will be beneficial to learn about your team’s respective challenges and if possible, help them find a way to overcome them. For example, someone on your team may be facing challenges because of their outdated equipment. This can easily be fixed by procuring new company devices for them. Another common problem is schedules. You might have team members who are parents and prefer to start their day a bit earlier. Having them online an hour earlier than the rest of the team is an easy solution to facilitate smoother workflow.

2. Provide Them with Tools to Succeed

Show your team that you are invested in them by providing them with all they need to succeed. This can mean providing them with updated work equipment such as laptops, smartphones, and other peripheral devices. Or it can mean providing them with working tools such as Slack, Google Drive, ZenAdmin, and more. The easier you make it for your employees to work, the better results you’ll get.

If you’re looking for a list of must-have tools for managing your remote team, check this out.

3. Set Proper Boundaries

It is important for the team to clearly communicate their own personal boundaries. This includes how much work they can handle and the timelines with which they will be completed. Communicating and being transparent about this can help prevent burnout and can also help managers delegate tasks easily.

Besides this, you can also set periods for communication between coworkers and periods for ‘deep work’. That way you schedule specific times to get work done without worrying about missing a meeting or having to reply to someone.

4. Over-communicate!

Yes, everyone always talks about how communication is key, and they’re not wrong! When working in a remote team with screens and crackling internet between team members, it’s easy to misunderstand and misinterpret everything. Be clear and concise with what you’re trying to say and don’t be afraid to reach out to clarify details. The last thing you want in a remote team is radio silence. Make it a point to consistently share updates, progress, and maybe some helpful tips for the team.

You can also read up on these 7 Ways You Can Keep Your Remote Teams Engaged.

5. Focus On Interactivity

The difference between an online meeting and an in-person meeting can be felt almost immediately by most people. When being online, it is easier to lose focus and become distracted by something else, lose enthusiasm for solving the current problem, and riffing off each other’s ideas may be less natural online.

Encourage collaboration to help with team engagement and interactivity. Consider using online tools that can help facilitate smooth and easy communication between team members. On top of that, you can also invest more time in social interaction between team members to allow rapport to grow.

6. Make Sure Your Processes are Streamlined and Efficient

There’s nothing worse for a remote team than lengthy processes that prevent your team from getting any work done. Look at your processes and see how they can be improved to be more streamlined and efficient.

For example, the employee onboarding and offboarding process can be extremely tedious. Consider streamlining this by outsourcing to a company like ZenAdmin that can take care of all the tedious tasks for you. All you have to do is click a couple of buttons and your employees are set!

The same can be said for your IT support tickets. Instead of waiting for your fully-booked IT team to handle them, you can get ultra-fast responses from ZenAdmin’s elite team of IT professionals.

If you’re managing your device inventory, consider an all-in-one platform like ZenAdmin where you can view your entire device inventory, while having visibility of your devices’ health. You can manage upgrades, policies, and the distribution of patches across all devices within your company from just one place!

7. Recognize and Reward

The last thing you want your remote employee to feel is unrecognized and unrewarded. You want to celebrate their successes and accomplishments because they are also the company’s successes and accomplishments! And it’s not difficult to do.

Type out a shoutout on your Slack channel or send out a company email praising your employees for their accomplishments. You can also set up a rewards and recognition program or use tools that specialize in employee rewards. This not only keeps employees motivated but can also help boost morale and productivity.