13 Tips for Managing Remote Teams More Effectively in 2024

Dubbed the virtual water cooler, this replicates the office “water cooler” effect, fostering personal connections and trust, which is critical in social psychology for building group cohesion.

This helps remote team members feel more connected and engaged and shows you care about keeping them involved. Transparency also reduces uncertainty, which plagues many remote workers who fear they may be missing critical information others are privy to.

Sharing individual or team success with the whole company helps boost morale and makes remote employees feel like part of something bigger. Slack messages or dedicated email threads are a few ideas for doing this.

Social identity theory suggests that social interaction online enhances team identity and solidarity by reducing feelings of isolation.

Block off time in your calendar every week or two, and let people know they can come to you with questions or just chat. Google’s built-in appointment scheduling app works well for this.

Whether you use Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, or another document management system (DMS), ensure that every subject, task, set of instructions, etc., appears only once. Conflicting documentation can lead to costly mistakes and frustration.

For regular meetings, keep all your meeting notes in a single document. Use headings and page breaks to easily separate one date from another to reduce the total number of documents and make it easier to see what was discussed in any previous meeting.

You can’t realistically create instructions and documents for everything your team does. Instead, encourage them to do so. Not only is it a great opportunity for assessing workflows, but it also teaches them the value of good documentation.

You can choose how best to organize documentation, but make sure it’s consistent across a whole project or team. Use folders to group documentation by project, team, objective, and process.

Also, use clear, descriptive titles for both documents and folders so team members can easily understand what each contains and easily search for them.

All great remote managers should try to implement a way for team members to give feedback on documents so they can suggest updates or report errors.

This could be as simple as leaving a comment or suggestion in the document itself or adding a “Suggestion” section down at the bottom where comments or proposals can be assessed and actioned.

Maintain a change log in important documents to track what has been updated and why, providing context for team members and highlighting critical changes.

Training is the single most valuable investment you can make in cybersecurity. The vast majority of data leaks and security breaches occur due to human error, including human error in judgment.

Good training can help prevent most security issues. This is important for both old and new employees.

Easily guessed and simple passwords are another leading cause of data breaches. A password manager, which facilitates complex passwords, can mitigate this. It’s a minor extra expense, considering the average ransomware payment costs businesses $5.13 million.

This ensures all work is conducted on secure, monitored systems, greatly reducing the risk of unauthorized access or breaches, thus safeguarding your company’s sensitive data.

University professors hold “office hours,” where students can drop by to chat about schoolwork. You can do the same thing by setting aside a few hours every week that anyone can book. Or, you can set up a weekly Zoom call where anyone can drop in to speak with you.

Seek feedback and help from teams to build a sense of collaboration, trust, and accountability. For example, if you need to improve productivity, ask your team to brainstorm a few ideas for how to do that.

This could be a message thread or online whiteboard—a place for remote employees to add ideas as they have them. You can use different boards for different projects, teams, and themes (such as work-life balance and productivity).

Review the board once a week to see whether you can act on any suggestions and express gratitude for anyone who contributed.

Online, remote working is often asynchronous, with everyone working on their own time. For some team members, this can feel isolating. Try out a weekly “teamwork session.”

Have everyone join a video call and work quietly together. Just seeing colleagues hard at work and being able to message someone on the same call for help can be a real productivity booster.

This can be as simple as a shared space on Monday or Notion. Let it be known that it’s a living document, and encourage everybody to share their insights, workflows, and problems. Your job as a manager is to ensure the knowledge base stays well-organized.

Schedule weekly or bi-weekly meetings dedicated to sharing insights, updates, and solutions. Encourage team members to present recent challenges they’ve faced and how they resolved them. This helps foster a culture of learning, transparency, and teamwork.

The best online collaboration software makes it easier for remote employees to work together. For the best results, invest in training so your teams can make the most of their shared virtual environment.

Designate team members as silo breakers whose role is to ensure communication and documentation flow between different groups and departments. They can help identify information gaps and promote knowledge sharing.

Pair team members from different areas or levels for mentorship and coaching. This can help transfer knowledge, reduce barriers, and foster relationships across different segments of the organization.

“Plain language” is a concept used by governments and organizations to reduce confusion in written language. To write in plain language:

• Avoid industry jargon
• Use the active (rather than the passive) voice
• Think about what your readers need to see in your words

Take time to put extra effort into including bullet points in your emails and online communication, bolding or highlighting important information, and using subheadings. This will make it easy to pick out relevant information quickly.

Add summaries at the end of meetings, chats, and long emails. Whether you’re speaking or writing, sum up your ideas at the end, and include the most relevant information your team needs to know.

When managing remote employees, it’s wise to experiment to find the types of communication that work best for everybody. This could include email and text, voice or video conversations, recorded videos, comments on tasks, etc.

As human beings, not everyone will respond well to the same methods. Zoom Dysmorphia is a good example.

Accessibility features are essential for team members with disabilities but are, in general, helpful for everyone. For example, many video conferencing platforms now offer AI-generated closed captioning and transcripts.

Spend the first few minutes of virtual meetings checking in with one another. Demonstrate a genuine interest in your team’s well-being and their experiences outside of work. It’s important your team members find common interests, and this is one way to do that.

Throw virtual parties for important milestones, both work-related and otherwise. These could be the start or end of a project, a birthday, or a holiday celebration. There are tons of activities people can do together, virtually, from different locations, like virtual escape rooms, scavenger hunts, or Pictionary.

There are certain things people love to bond over, such as health and fitness, pets, cooking, and traveling—make sure there are virtual spaces dedicated to subjects like these and encourage people to share photos, videos, and stories.

This can make team members feel valued and foster a sense of belonging. Whether it’s company-branded items or personalized gifts, it can be a delightful experience that strengthens team bonds and reinforces your company culture.

This should include everything they need to do as part of onboarding, including signing paperwork, reviewing the employee handbook, and completing training.

Include written information, short videos, and a full description of every task and process your new hire needs to know about. Hop on at least three conference calls with every new hire to walk them through the tech you use and offer live training. This helps you see whether a new team member needs more support.

Ask a member of your team who’ll be working closely with the new employee to check in with them every week. Set up weekly calls between the two where they can discuss work and get to know each other.

Be sure the new hire is supported by other colleagues and yourself. This is an important aspect of onboarding that shouldn’t be overlooked, particularly with remote working.

It can be difficult, as some team members may be in different time zones and have different work hours than the new employee. Be sure to factor this in.

Introduce your new team member on your project management system, on group chats, and at your next team meeting. Share what new skills this individual brings to the team and how they’ll be making an amazing contribution.