Best Practices for Managing Remote Employees and Meetings

5 Strategies for Managing Remote Employees

Based on tips found in our guidebook, Leading Dispersed Teams, and our research white paper on managing virtual teams, these strategies can help you build, support, and succeed with geographically dispersed teams.

1. Define the team.

If you’re forming a new team, be clear from the beginning about the team’s purpose. What tasks do you expect your team to complete? Explain why those tasks are important so that team members understand the big picture and meaning behind what they’re working to accomplish.

If you’ve inherited a team or are struggling with your existing team, take time to understand the team’s purpose and vision — and be sure you and your team members are on the same page. To be effective in the face of different perspectives and experiences, it’s important for your team to unite around a shared purpose and vision.

2. Clarify roles & expectations.

Once you’ve all agreed on your team’s purpose, ensure there’s clear direction for how to complete the tasks required to accomplish your mission.

Geographically dispersed team members require tactical direction.

For example, what specific tasks or perspective do you expect each team member to contribute? Because team members may not understand why they’ve been chosen, schedule a meeting to share why each member was named to the team, their unique background and valuable skills, and the role you expect them to play.

A team charter can help you stay on track, clarify roles, and meet your objectives. Read more about how to keep your team on track with a team charter.

3. Establish procedures.

With everyone in agreement on roles and responsibilities, share a game plan for how your team should interact with each other.

Our experts have found that team members spread across multiple time zones often end up working long hours to accommodate each other’s schedules. These unrealistic schedules lead to low productivity and burnout.

To help prevent this, ensure members can get the bulk of their work done during their normal working hours. Successful virtual team management should include providing tools for scheduling and guidelines on “connectivity” to minimize early morning or late-night meetings. Global virtual teams especially need clarity on when they should (or shouldn’t) be available, including on weekends and local holidays.

Additionally, in different facilities and in different cultures, routine processes often differ greatly, which can leave team members confused.

Team leaders should establish norms and provide training for best practices such as meeting formats, use of technologies and communication, and decision-making. Training and processes should include a clear indication of which tools will be used for what purposes. This will prevent the same information being sent via multiple mediums and keep work from falling through the cracks.

4. Invest in trust.

Now that you’ve set the direction for your team and you’ve coordinated alignment, it’s time to get the commitment. In other words, you want to ensure that each team member feels responsible for your group’s outcomes.

That requires trust, and here’s where things get challenging for you as a team leader.

Virtual teams often struggle to build and maintain trust. Not only do they lack the physical proximity that encourages feelings of cohesiveness, but often members are unsure how to address cultural differences.

To build team trust, there are things you can do in the short-term, such as:

• Periodically hold virtual “face-to-face” meetings to build rapport.
• Keep the team informed of long-term organizational changes.
• Ask for team input on critical organizational issues.
• Celebrate short-term wins, reinforcing the team’s shared effort.

The more often team members can meet “face-to-face” through real-time technologies, the higher their levels of success. That’s because tools like videoconferencing allow for members to interpret non-verbal communication, like hand gestures, facial expressions, and body posture. As a result, communication feels more familiar and natural. Team members may need support to develop a strong virtual persona and effective virtual communication.

Perhaps most importantly, understand that trust will come with time, and focus on the long term rather than expecting overnight cohesion of the team.

5. Recognize the impact of differences.

Dispersed team members often have a love-hate relationship with virtual teamwork. They may love new tools for virtual collaboration, but struggle with best practices for virtual communication. Learning about different cultures may excite them, but misunderstandings that result from a language barrier cause frustration. Some may love the autonomy of working remotely but also feel out of the loop and isolated at times.

It may be tempting to assume common mindsets and values. But it’s important for leaders who are managing remote employees to remember that their team members have unique experiences and perspectives, and leading a multicultural team requires leadership skill.

As a leader, consider your own cultural assumptions and behaviors. Take care to ensure that your choices and actions reflect the considerations of not just your thinking, but of your group members’ preferences, as well.

And when you schedule meetings and delegate responsibilities, be sure to factor in cultural considerations such as social status, language challenges or barriers, time differences, and distance. All these factors impact team members’ ability to participate and contribute, and your effectiveness at leading from a distance depends upon you being able to take those differences into account.

Managing Virtual Teams: Best Practices for Leading Meetings

From a distance, it can be hard for participants to contribute to a virtual meeting. Make things easier by taking these steps:

1. Create a detailed agenda and send it out before the meeting, so participants know what to expect and come prepared.
2. List the names of attendees at the start of the meeting, so everyone is reminded of who’s there.
3. Address attendees by name when verbally interacting with participants and provide opportunities for all attendees to contribute.
4. Stay on task to keep the group engaged and to keep people away from the temptation to multitask.
5. Provide brief recaps as you move through the agenda, restating what the collective input is before you move onto the next item.
6. Seek feedback and provide it via all communication channels.
7. Send action items in a meeting recap to all participants to reiterate what was decided upon and what the next steps are.

Above all, keep communication lines open to ensure everyone is aligned and working together to achieve the shared goal.

Tips For Leading More Effective Virtual Meetings

We can all admit that while many virtual team meetings feel essential and productive, some feel like a waste of time. If you’re managing virtual teams, it’s your responsibility to ensure the meetings you’re scheduling are effective. Consider these 3 characteristics that distinguish the most useful meetings from the rest:

1. Everyone participating feels the agenda couldn’t be addressed without the meeting.

Most things don’t require meetings — an email will suffice. Pretending to need people’s input doesn’t require a meeting; just announce the decision that’s already been made.

But some things — like problems we don’t have solutions to yet or conflicts that haven’t been fully explored — require human interaction and collaborative thinking. If we need to take time to let creative solutions emerge, a meeting may be needed.

2. Attendees are fully present.

How many meetings have you been a part of where others are more invested in their phones or other work than the meeting itself? Or where some attendees only perk up to really listen when the boss speaks?

Active participation isn’t accomplished by nagging; it’s accomplished via a meeting agenda that focuses the conversation on decisions that make a difference.

3. Productive discussion is driven through a detailed meeting agenda.

Meeting agendas should not only name the items you’ll be discussing, but also clearly state what result is required from each discussion point. Do we need to identify deliverables today? Make final decisions? Adjust traffic management or information sharing? Before signing on for the virtual meeting, attendees should agree on what we’ll be accomplishing and the kinds of conversations we’ll use to get results.

Agendas like this should be shared in advance so decisions can be made in a timely way. People shouldn’t hear about something for the first time at a meeting.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

If you’re ready to develop your leaders in best practices for managing remote employees, partner with us to craft a customized learning journey for your team using our research-based modules. Available leadership topics include Authenticity, Collaboration & Teamwork, Communication, Emotional Intelligence, Listening to Understand, Psychological Safety, Virtual & Remote Team Leadership, and more.