It’s official: remote work is in fashion. Brick and mortar-based companies are finding it hard to survive in this time of coronavirus confinement. Or how to square the circle of keeping people indoors for their health and maintaining organizational output.
What this results in is a huge shift online. But it’s not shifting as smoothly as it could. As we are seeing, companies of all sorts, are working hard to keep things as they were pre-coronavirus Which is the main mistake they are making to shift.
Today, however, it should be obvious that managing a remote team and managing office employees are not the same thing. Remote is not necessarily harder or easier – just different hence why many companies aren’t clear about how to do remote.
If you wanted to learn more about how to do remote right, you could do a lot. Yet why not see what not to do.
3 Common traps of Remote Working
1. Level of trust
Lack of trust is one of the most complex issues to resolve. From the outset let’s say this: an ideal environment for working remotely is built on trust—and reciprocally. The decisions taken by a manager need to be trusted by the team members and the manager needs to be able to trust that the team will do the work.
We have seen a lot of cases of managers not trusting their teams by moaning on Linkedin that they have lost control of their team. It should not be forgotten that not everything has changed in that respect. People were taking breaks, getting sidetracked, and making errors before remote working came along The same people were in your office. You will continue to appreciate their efforts now as then.
Good project management platforms such as the 24Stack’s allow clear directions and expectations to be set out. This, in turn, means the workload can be managed efficiently. In short, trust means productivity as the other traps will show us.
2. SCRUM Meetings
As always, your team will need the tools to give their best work. SCRUM meetings are one guarantee that they have this. Here are ways in which remote teams can get the most out of them:
- Use a reliable software package for conferencing. GoRemote, for example, is one of the best solutions now available on the market.
- Ensure your team knows how to use this software fully. You can do this by creating online video learning sessions.
- Meetings should be tailored to the number of people attending and their needs. They should not last more than 1 hour.
- Lead the meeting, ensuring all members have the chance to speak. It is important to ask questions, communicate any updates, and always ask for feedback before closing the meeting.
3. Too much micromanagement
In an ideal situation, supposing an employee has been given a task in-office. Provided the work is done on time, the onus is on the employee to take care of everything, informing his or her manager of progress, thereby ensuring any obstacles are overcome.
On the other hand, a micromanaging manager would be on the employee’s back all the time and be asking for continual updates surplus to what is needed. In short, you would have no freedom to test things, learn from mistakes, or just think freely for yourself. The employee would just do the work in the manager’s way.
Not only is this time-consuming, but micro-managing also drains your team’s precious motivation, guaranteeing your team will be stuck in burn-out inland. The team becomes dependent and lack innovation, barring the path towards improvement.
Implementing ticketing-style project management tools like 24Stack’s along with simply making goals clear, giving clear priorities, and using the SMART philosophy for clear results to get ahead in business is one of the best ways to avoid micromanaging. A dash of innovation and challenges won’t go astray either.
