How to Manage Remote Teams – a Guide for Business Owners who Support Digital Nomadism

• Monday, August 28th, 2017
• Blog
• 2 responses

It’s never easy to manage employees. But managing teams who aren’t even in the same room as you and whom your probably never met is a whole different story.

Speaking of stories, here’s my remote working one.

It’s been more than five years since I was first a member of a remote team. I did have to work in an office on a 9 to 6 schedule, but I had to coordinate with our office in a different country. I was managed from a distance and I had to manage a partly remote team.

This is when I first found out that things aren’t as easy as they may seem when it comes to managing remote teams, even if with all the technology that we have access to.

After that, each of my jobs involved some kind of connection with an office in a different country, sometimes even on a different continent. Right now, I manage Idunn and I have one client in my home town and zero staff members here.

Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and Asia – these are the places where our customers and my team are. Fun, right?

It’s not seldom that I have to wake up really early for a conference with an Australian client and send an email at 12 AM to a team member in Texas. But I think it’s all worth it.

As a digital nomad, you get to work from the comfort of your home, your favorite café or your favorite beach. And these don’t even have to be in the same country. Digital nomadism is also called “the laptop lifestyle” because all you really need is a laptop (and an Internet connection).

And I’m not the only one who thinks that it’s worth it. Telecommuting is clearly on the rise all over the world. In 2016, 22% of Americans did some or all of their work from outside the office. As you may expect, the highest percentage of people who can and want to telecommute have an advanced degree.

Before we dig in how to manage remote teams, let’s take a look at why remote working is beneficial for business owners.

Top Reasons Why You Should Consider Remote Working for You and Your Employees

A couple of years back, I wrote another article about ditching your office and becoming a digital nomad. But, I admit, it mostly came from enthusiasm. I was rather new at fully remote work and I had yet to learn what it means to manage remote teams and juggle remote clients.

Still, I believe that most of those benefits apply. And I got to experience a few new ones:

1. Remote Work Increases Productivity

I’ve seen it in myself and my team and there’s also a completely objective study that supports it. If you think about it, it makes perfect sense: if you know you are going to be stuck at the office until 6pm, why bother finishing a task earlier? When you know you can do whatever you want after you’re done working, you’ll be more motivated to finish earlier.

This applies even to workers that still have to log 8 hours, no matter where they do it from. Since they don’t have to put up with a long commute, they’ll be well-rested as soon as they reach their “office”. Plus, they won’t be distracted by water cooler gossip or a noisy office.

2. Telecommuting Lowers Stress and Boosts Morale

A 2014 study showed that 82% of telecommuting workers reported lower levels of stress. Plus, 69% had lower absenteeism levels.

3. Offering the Possibility of Working Remotely Reduces Employee Turnover

After offering your employees this opportunity, you could have a level of job attrition 50% lower than you do now. And why wouldn’t it be this way? Your employees can save time and money on their commute. This can be equated with a raise and more time to spend with their loved ones.

4. You Will Have Lower Operating Costs

This one is a no brainer: you will need a smaller office and you will pay lower electricity and heating bills. Plus, think about all that adds up: water, snacks and coffee may not cost a lot, but they do cost something. For instance, American Express reported saving as much as $15 million per year just from real estate costs.

5. It Has a Positive Impact on the Environment

Working remotely helps mitigate climate change. Just think about all the gallons of gasoline your employees could save if they didn’t have to come to the office every day. Plus, it’s a good incentive for eco-conscious employees.

6. Your Employees Want it

…and you can’t really change that. Younger generations, like Millennials who take workplaces by storm, strongly demand it. 68% of them say they would be more inclined to working for a company that offered the possibility of telecommuting.

Now that we got the good parts covered, let’s dig into the not-so-good parts. Or the parts that need a bit more effort. Yes, there are some of those, too.

How to Manage Remote Teams – a Nutshell Guide

I know that no two remote teams are identical, so it takes a lot of trial and error before you get the on the right track and everyone works at full productivity. For me, it took about half a year to fine tune some things and I still believe there is room for improvement. But this is what I know to hold true so far:

1. Hire for Cultural Fit

This one may be tricky, especially if your entire team is remote. However, you must still have a sense of your company’s culture and the personalities of your other employees. It’s very likely that most of them are introverts, so try to accommodate this from the head start.

In the beginning, I used to hire based on heavy testing and a few online chats. And when I say heavy testing, I mean it – less than 5% of the people I screen make it past this phase.

But I digress.

What I was trying to say is that I used to be incredibly focused on quality and performance and completely forgot about cultural fit. In the meantime, I learned that dedication and ability to work in a team are equally important, so I make a point out of having at least one video call with potential hires.

2. Set Measurable Onboarding Goals

What should your new hire learn within 30 days? What about 60 or 90 days? Set standards and inform new employees about them from the very beginning.

Throughout the accommodation period, make sure you check in on their progress and have team and one-on-one calls more often than you normally would. This also helps with making new employees feel part of the company.

For me, the major points of assessment are the way their writing improves and how well they do on their regular assessments. For extra points, I always encourage new hires to pick up a new digital marketing skill and learn constantly.

3. Set Goals

The number one question associated with managing remote teams is “How can I tell if my employees are really working?”

The answer may sound simple, but it hides some complex actions: you set clear goals.

For instance, they need to finish a certain task within three days. But finishing it shouldn’t be enough – it also has to be good work.

Whether you work on an hourly, per project or monthly payment schedule, quality-related goals should always be your number one concern. You don’t work in the same office, so you can’t know how much of the day your employees spend on Facebook and how much time they spend doing actual work.

And you know what? You shouldn’t even have to care about that.

As long as the work comes in on time and it’s flawless, it doesn’t matter.

At Idunn, I set up a per-project and per-performance payment system. I don’t like to pay people per hour because I strongly believe their time should be their own. Plus, if one SEO writer can finish an article in one hour, while another takes two for the same work, why should the first be penalized?

4. Keep in Touch

When you manage remote teams, you can’t afford the luxury of postponing the answer to an inquiry for too long. Odds are you will forget about a few of them and there will be no one to come to your desk and give you a friendly reminder.

If you manage remote teams in different time zones, things get even more complicated. My rules for responding inquiries are:

• Slack or Skype message: within two hours
• Email: by the end of the business day, sooner if the sender is in a very different time zone

This is a very sensitive issue: you don’t want to be interrupted every five minutes to answer a new inquiry (or email from a client), but you can’t wait too long either. I think that this is a balance that everyone sets for themselves. It took me a long while to stop from ditching what I was doing and jump on an email or chat window that had just opened. To be honest, I still struggle with that, especially when I sense that it may concern something rather urgent.

But I’m working on it!

In addition to answering inquiries and assigning tasks, I make sure I get some video time with each member of my team at least one per month. I know working in your PJs is perhaps one of the most rewarding things about telecommuting, but connecting this way has proven very beneficial for all our motivation levels.

Full disclosure: I sometimes wear sweatpants during those calls. And lipstick!

5. Offer Performance Incentives

No one likes their employees to slack off. But it’s inevitable. In fact, a bit of time to look at the ceiling or even at a TV show in the middle of the day can do wonders for your productivity and creativity. And, again, I don’t really care what people do as long as they submit their work in time.

Still, I know that it may be tempting to finish a whole season of a TV show before doing any work and then rush to meet the deadline with obvious quality problems. So I came up with a few tricks to remedy that:

1. Monthly top performance bonus: offered to one employee whose work is outstanding/flawless
2. Monthly performance bonuses: offered to the employees whose work was stellar the entire month.
3. Impossible deadline bonus: whenever we are faced with a tight deadline, there is a significant bonus for the person who takes one for the team and offers to complete the work within record time.

I make sure these bonuses happen every month. And I also make sure that I mention them whenever I hire SEO copywriters or social media experts as soon as we dig into payment discussions. I want them know that we are performance-oriented and that they will always be encouraged to learn more and outdo themselves.

6. Check in every once in a while for no Serious Reason

The turnover rates may be lower when you manage remote teams, but employees leaving you is still something that will happen. What’s worse is that you won’t even see the signs before it does.

What I like to do to prevent that or, at least, get a sense of how my team is feeling is check in on how they are doing in general. I ask them if they feel motivated, if they like their current assignment, if there is something I could help them with, if they need more client input in general and so on.

On top of getting a sense about how they feel at Idunn, this also helps me collect valuable information about our briefing methods and our current standards.

All in all, it’s not easy to manage remote teams, but it can be incredibly rewarding. And, of course, you may finally get that work-life balance in check.

What about you? What are your favorite tips for managing remote teams? Let us know in the comment section below.

Adriana Tica

Adriana Tica is an expert marketer and copywriter, with 10 years in the field, most of which were spent marketing tech companies. She is the Owner and Founder of Idunn. In October 2019, she also launched Copywritech, a digital marketing agency that provides copywriting, SEO content writing, and strategy services to companies in the tech industry.