How To Improve Your Remote Team’s Performance

Now that you have decided to leave the office-based pattern of work and manage a remote team, the main challenge you will have is improving and sustaining their performances.

Richard Branson once said that the future of business is remote teamwork and he might not be far from the truth. So, what can one do to boost the performance of a remote team? Here are tips you that can help you achieve that.

• Get to know the team members
• Create a reward system
• Effective communication
• Give clear instructions
• Use remote team management App

It is difficult to improve what you don’t know much about. Get to know each and every individual on the team, such as their strengths, weaknesses, experiences, and qualifications.

Keep a detailed record of each of them. And be lenient with your team members – withing reason – to make sure you are giving them flexibility without letting them take advantage of it. Do not punish them for not putting up the expected performance. Instead, give them some time off to think about what went wrong and how things can get better.

Knowing your team members will make it easier to allocate tasks to the right people. If you have a blog on different niches, for example, you cannot allocate a legal document or article to a team member that has a nursing degree. Try to align your talent with your goals, making sure that right people are performing the right jobs. This is essentially the motto behind every workforce planning effort.

Rewards serves different purposes. It can help to make your team more competitive, improve motivation and retain key team members. It can also have a two-way effect on your team members – positive or negative.

The negative effect could reduce performance. And it occurs when the rationale behind the reward is not clear.

To improve team performance, you must know when, what, and who to reward. Find out what each team member feels about the reward and the impact it has on them. They also need to know the fairness and importance, and what should be done to merit such an honor. You can break the target down into smaller units, rewarding them for each milestone they achieve.

There is a high tendency for a bridge in communication to occur when more than one person is working on a task. And this can lower performance or cause setbacks for the team. If more than one person is working on a data entry task, for example, create a means for everyone involved in the project to communicate and share ideas if need be.

Communication can affect performance greatly, too. Each team member should be able to contact you or any other member with ease, just as they would in an office setting. A team member may have encountered challenges while working on a task and need urgent help to continue.

Create group chats with team members on any of the social media platforms. Add everyone into one group, and then, create sub-groups for specific tasks and team members working on them. Organize video conferences on a weekly or monthly basis to get the whole team together. And allow every team member to make contributions to such meetings. Technology has come a long way when it comes to this type of communication with apps like Slack, Trello, and more leading the way.

Do not put your team members in a situation where they start guessing what the outcome of a task should be. Give clear and simple instructions. You can also attach some explanations if possible. And ask if they understand the project before allowing them to start working on it. If they don’t, be ready to provide more details. Not providing clear instructions can lead to frustration. It will also mislead team members.

Remote team management apps can help to improve productivity. And there are plenty of them you can use for your team. You can update the necessary information, manage and exchange files from diverse sources. Trello – like we mentioned above – is one of the remote management apps that suit such situation. It is available on the web, Andriod, iPhone, and Windows 8 devices. Team members can also keep tabs on a project on the go.

Conclusion

Managing a remote team is not easy. But it’s cost effective and achievable. With the right mechanism and plan in place, you can achieve better performance from each one of your remote team members. And the above tips will help you get the results you seek.

Scarlett Gibson is a technical writer and a content strategist at WriteMyPaper. With a long experience as a professional freelance writer and a writers’ team leader she gained an outstanding knowledge in remote teams management.