How to Manage Remote Employees: Best Practices for Remote Job Management

The growing trend in organizations active in every sector of the economy is remote work. The benefits of home and flexible working were already known, but – before the pandemic – managers and professionals were still reluctant to transition to smart working. The pandemic, however, forced us to make the change.

What was a temporary alternative has become a new trend: remote work is more and more frequent. The benefits for workers are many: they can be more flexible, they avoid burnout, productivity is increased, and so on… But remote work isn’t devoid of new challenges.

One of the most important challenges set by smart working is for managers and employers. How do you manage a team and their work efficiently when employees are working from their homes, other towns, and sometimes even other countries?

In this article, we’ll share the best practices to improve employee management for remote jobs. As we’ll see, it requires a shift of mind by both employers and employees and the right software tools that can keep the team connected even when physically apart.

Manage a Team Remotely: Change Your Mindset

When managers first transition their teams’ workflow to remote work they may feel like they’re lacking control over both the team and the work to be done. When your employees share the same office or building, it’s easier to collect their output, watch that they’re giving their best, ask them to fix an issue, and so on…

Employees may feel disoriented too: how are they going to know what they need to do? How will they know if they’re doing a good job? How will they sync their work with the ones of colleagues?

All these thoughts and worries are perfectly normal. But the first thing that is required of both employers and employees is a mental leap. As a manager adapting to remote work, first you need to change your mindset, second, you want to implement the best remote management practices.

1. Trust Your Team

The manager needs to loosen their control over the team. It doesn’t mean that the team all of a sudden can do what they like, but that each member should be autonomous in their work.

For this to happen, you need to be clear with your direction and expectations, and they need to be autonomous during the work. It also requires good relationships and trust between managers and employees.

2. Empower Your Employees

Employees should be motivated to do their best not because you require it, but because they want to do a good job. Because you can’t watch them working all day, you need to create an environment where everyone is willing to give their best as part of a team.

3. Learn to Delegate

All good managers should learn to delegate but this is even more important with remote work: share the control over work and projects with colleagues, collaborators, and employees.

4. Learn from Issues

The migration towards remote work will be a process and it won’t be everything perfect from day one. Don’t let issues demotivate you and, on the contrary, try to learn from them.

Employee Management Remote Job: Main Challenges

Remote jobs cause new challenges to both workers and employers. As a manager, you not only have to be aware of the challenges that you need to face but also of the ones faced by your workers.

1. Lack of Face-to-Face Interaction

Especially when the migration to remote work just happened, both workers and managers can suffer from the absence of face-to-face communication. This is something that will be mitigated with time, but it’s still important to address the problem.

Solution: Use premium communication tools to improve communication between you and your employees. Video calls are the ones that best mimic the in-person interaction.

2. Screen Fatigue

Employees who start to work remotely will begin spending a lot of time in front of a screen. This is a reason why video calls aren’t always ideal for communication.

Solution: Inform your team about the risks of spending so much time in front of the screen, suggest pauses, and choose communication channels different from video calls when appropriate.

3. Communication Breakdowns

Remote communication can not be as efficient as reaching your colleague’s desk to ask a quick question: chats and emails can go unnoticed, phone calls and video calls are slow, and so on…

Solution: This challenge can be faced by using the right remote job management tools, the ones provided with premium communication features.

4. Distractions

When working from home, or in spaces different from an office, people have many more distractions (children, people talking, noise, the phone rings, someone’s at the door…).

Solution: Help your team by providing them with a space where they can share their problems and discuss solutions together.

5. Security Concerns

When every communication, schedule, deadline, delivery, and payment happens online, everything is exposed to attacks. Cybersecurity becomes an important matter.

Solution: Rely on premium employee management software that doesn’t only enhance performances but also guarantees security.

Employee Management Remote Job: Best Practices

We’ve spoken about the changes you need to make in your mindset when you start managing your employees remotely. Now let’s discuss the practices that you should adopt.

1. Improve Communication

Because you and your employees are no longer sharing a room or a building, you want to optimize communication:

• Provide the right communication tools to each team member
• Make sure communication is clear

While the first point is easily solvable by using the right software tool, the second needs some effort from you: you may need to switch your communication strategies. If you were used to discussing your goals with the team verbally, now you may want to create schedules with precise tasks and deadlines.

2. Improve Interactions

When a team works remotely, they not only need to communicate but also work together on the same file, update the same document, edit the same piece of code, and so on…

Interactions can be improved thanks to the premium software tools that we have at our disposal.

3. Follow Up Regularly

When everyone is working from their place and knows what to do, it is easy to remain focused on our work and forget about the rest of the team. While focusing on your work, do not forget to reach out to your employees regularly.

A regular follow-up doesn’t have to always be a virtual meeting or a video call. For example, you could share a platform where any team member can check the completed tasks, the ones in progress, and so on…

4. Set Productivity Standards

Because you can’t be there watching over the work your employees do, it’s important that you are clear with your expectations. You need to set productivity standards that are measurable.

A measurable standard is, for example, “every software developer needs to deliver the assigned project in 8 working days”, or “call at least eight clients per hour”, and so on…

5. Find New Ways to Provide Directions

When working remotely, you have a lot of other tools at your disposal: you could create a video to share with your employees so that you don’t have to repeat the same conversation, and you could use dashboards, interactive schedules, and more.

6. Provide the Right Tools

Software tools are the ones that allow communication, interactions, collaboration, follow-up, and more. Your role as a manager requires you to pick the right software tool to enhance the remote workflow.

Remote Work Technology

Now that you know the best practices of remote employee management, you need the tools that allow you to implement them. Your best option is being able to rely on one software tool that:

• Allows for communication between team members
• Allows for interaction and collaboration
• Allows for the manager to follow up the work
• Meets your security standards

VoicePing 2.0: The Complete Remote Employee Management Solution

VoicePing 2.0 is a remote employee management software tool that becomes a point of reference for both team members and managers. Managers have at their disposal features specifically designed to help them manage their team remotely: virtual office, scheduling, customized features, and more…

Key Benefits:

• Multiple Teams Support: Just like in-person, with VoicePing you can manage multiple departments and multiple teams
• Comprehensive Environment: Creates a space where managers and team members can meet, communicate and collaborate
• Enhanced Productivity: Take advantage of all the proven benefits of remote work (reduced costs, increased productivity, enhanced motivation)
• Cross-Platform: Available for Mac, Windows and Linux computers

Conclusion

Remote employee management can be challenging but once you’ve addressed all the different aspects and learned how to deal with them it becomes manageable. The transition to remote working is easier when you rely on the right software tools.

The most recommended application is VoicePing. With it, you can easily manage your employees remotely and start exploiting all the benefits of remote working, like flexibility, enhanced motivation, reduction of costs, and increased productivity.

Try VoicePing free and transform how you manage your remote team.