Managing remote teams comes with several challenges attached to it that you’ll need to deal with if you want your teams to be a success. If you want to know exactly what challenges you can expect and how to deal with them – just keep reading.
When employees are working in the office you can directly supervise them so you know they’re working, can observe their progress and address any issues that arise. However that isn’t possible with remote teams, which means there is less accountability.
The best solution to this is by using employee monitoring software such as Controlio. It will track exactly how employees spend their time and what they do so you can use it to track attendance, work hours, and supervise employees while they’re working.
If necessary you can even use Controlio to look more closely at what your remote teams are doing by capturing keystrokes, screenshots or screen recording videos.
Because remote team members work different hours and are possibly in different time zones, it can be difficult to ensure they’re all present for meetings or collaboration sessions. The best way to do this is to use scheduling tools to fix times when everyone is available.
An alternative to scheduling tools is to use the data that Controlio collects and figure out the best time based on when they normally work. Whichever method you use, you should make it a policy that all team members are present during those hours.
Many remote team members end up feeling isolated due to the lack of connection and camaraderie. The way to ensure this doesn’t happen is by streamlining communications, checking-in regularly, and hosting team building sessions.
It can help to use employee monitoring tools such as Controlio to monitor for early warning signs that employees are feeling isolated and disengaged. Typically this will cause them to be distracted and affect their productivity – which you can track via the productivity score it calculates.
When employees work remotely and log in to the company network and access data from devices in their home – it exposes you to increased security risks. After all, home networks and other devices may not be as secure as those in your office.
Ideally you should make sure all your employees are trained in basic security best practices including the use of strong passwords, how to detect phishing attempts, and basic do’s and don’ts. On top of that you may want to use two-factor authentication and improve your company’s security to detect suspicious behavior and block it.
Make no mistake there are other challenges you may have to deal with when managing remote teams – but there are the 4 that are most common. Now that you know how to handle them it should make it far easier for you to manage remote teams successfully and with fewer issues.