Working remotely is becoming more common as people look for increased flexibility in balancing their work and personal life. 

As companies become more global they have satellite offices across the country, and across the world.  This means that more and more employees are working remotely.  

A 2017 census indicated that over 5% of the workforce is now working from home and trends indicate this number will increase.  Some studies predict that over 40% of full-time American workers want to work from home more frequently. 

While there are plenty of benefits to both employees and companies for having a remote workforce, it does have it’s challenges when managing teams.  With less face-to-face contact managers have less insight into the teams days-to-day tasks, and challenges.  Popping into someone’s office to check on status, or them popping into yours to ask a quick question doesn’t happen as often. 

Connecting with people at the human level is more challenging with remote workers, and team members may feel more disconnected.  

As the workforce becomes more distributed, managers must adapt and learn how to successfully manage remote employees.  This means improving communication, communication methods and experimenting to determine which communication methods work most successfully for you and the team.

Here are tips to help you navigate managing a remote workforce and building a cohesive team.

Have more frequent and short meetings.

Instead of meetings that are several hours long, shorten the meetings and have them more frequently.  It provides touch points that get missed with remote workers who you can’t chat with in the kitchen, the hall or a quick impromptu meeting.

When you have meetings be mindful of different time zones.

Be considerate of team members in other time zones and try to schedule meetings that are respectful of different time zones. 

It’s frustrating for team members to have to be available for meetings before dawn or late at night.  If it’s not possible to accommodate everyone, periodically hold an individual meeting with someone and bring them up to date on what happened during the team meeting.  

Schedule one-on-one meetings. 

Having 1:1 meetings allows you to not only develop rapport, it provides time for them to ask questions, you to check in on projects, and lets them know they are important.

Calendar these meetings and make them a consistent date and time.  Whenever possible do these meetings via video to help build a personal connection that may get missed when you don’t see each other.

Periodically schedule in person team meetings.

When many of your team members are remote it’s useful to schedule an in person meeting a few times of year, or at least yearly, for the whole team.  Having in person time together helps teams jell. 

Make sure you build in time for both working and socializing together as a team.

Talk about other topics besides work.

Get to know your people, wherever they work.  Find out about their family, their children, their interests.  Ask about their vacation when they return to work.  Talk about sports, movies or TV shows that everyone is talking about. 

Of course stay away from any topic that is political, racial, religious or otherwise is of a sensitive nature.  

Make people feel included.

When you’re having meetings virtually, whether by phone or via video, make sure to include everyone.  It’s difficult enough to stay focused during virtual meetings, but if no one asks you to speak, staying connected and focused is even more challenging. 

Make sure that everyone speaks, provides input, has the opportunity to ask questions and can feel just as included as if they were sitting in a conference room across the table from others.

Share company and project information and updates in meetings.

When you work down the hall from your team it’s easy to stop by their office and update them on company information or a change in the direction of the project.

It’s also easy to forget to tell this same information to the team members that work remotely.  When they don’t know they feel left out, and less connected. 

Include as part of your meeting agendas an update on company and project information or updates.

Communicate company and team goals.

Everyone needs to be aware of what’s important to the company…it’s goals and how what the team is doing is connected to the goals. 

It’s also important to have team goals and share those with every member of the team, and regularly revisit them.  Things change and if you make it a priority to regularly discuss the team’s goals everyone will have the same information and be on the same page.

Define clear expectations and deadlines.  

All teams, whether virtual or not should define expectations and deadlines.  However when the team is not all in one location making sure this information is defined and communicated is even more important. 

Take the time to define roles and responsibilities, and lines of authority for each team member and share with the rest of the team.  Create deadlines for tasks, check-in points and the project as a whole.

The more well defined everything is the less chance of confusion.

Introduce new team members.

When a new team member joins the company or the team, introduce them to the rest of the team. 

Ask them to  share background about themselves, personally and professionally with the rest of the team.  Have the other team members share a few minutes of background about themselves also. 

And if possible to do this on video so they can see each other and connect with the face, not just the voice.

Use technology to stay connected.

There are dozens of chat, project and other communication tools to help your team stay connected, ask questions and keep others informed of progress. 

Find what works best for your team but don’t use them as a replacement for voice or video interactions. 

Stay connected at the human level, not just through technology.

Building a great team is challenging under the best of conditions.  When you add in people working remotely, in different countries and in different time zones it is even more challenging.  As with most situations, communication is key. 

Figure out what works best in terms of frequency of meetings, one-on-one meetings and technology to support easy access to each other.  

All extraordinary teams and poor teams have common characteristics. 

Learn what they are and how to use them to take your team from poor to good, good to great or great to extraordinary.