Best practices for remote team management

• Managing remote employee expectations is vital. Organizations with proper hiring practices and infrastructure can maintain efficiency comparable to in-office scenarios. Offering fully remote work remains attractive due to cost reductions in real estate, increased competitiveness in hiring and access to a global workforce.

• Employee engagement is critical to maximizing remote work benefits. Managers should prioritize employee engagement, foster a supportive environment and ensure employees have the correct technology. Employee engagement can be driven by providing purpose, development, coaching and connection.

• Securing information for remote employees is a top priority. Organizations should focus on people, technology and processes to ensure secure information access. This includes creating a remote working policy, securing home Wi-Fi, utilizing cloud security solutions and providing IT support for remote workers.

The importance of managing remote employee expectations

In organizations with proper hiring practices and the infrastructure to support remote work, the right people are filling the right roles, and work is getting done just as efficiently as it does in in-office scenarios.

Unfortunately, a 2023 report from the Standford Institute for Economic Policy Research found that fully remote work scenarios created a 10% drop in productivity when compared to both hybrid or fully in-office scenarios (those two produced the same productivity rates).

For many businesses, even with that drop, offering employees a fully remote work situation is still attractive:

• It can drive cost reductions for real estate investments

• Most employees want to work remotely, so it can make an organization more competitive for hiring and retaining employees

• It opens your workforce to the entire world, not just your local candidate pool

So what’s going on? How can managers get the most out of their workers while also delivering the benefits of offering remote work — for the organization and the employee?

1. Prioritize employee engagement

Today’s employees want purpose, development, coaching and connection to feel engaged and to know their work contributes to something bigger. Smart organizations facilitate and encourage these tactics in both remote and on-site work environments. If that’s not the case, disengagement can drive business outcomes down, and even have a contagious effect on team morale.

Managers, who Gallup reports can account for up to 70% of variance in employee engagement across business units, have the opportunity to make a major impact on the work of their team and, ultimately, the success of the organization.

2. Foster a supportive environment

Exceptional leaders are attentive, according to Harvard Business Review’s “What amazing bosses do differently.” Listening, being empathetic and recognizing the unique situations of each person on a team will make their jobs more enjoyable and meaningful.

When it comes to managing a remote team, managers can be supportive by:

• Trusting the people they hired: Managers may feel uncomfortable with a lack of direct visibility over remote employees’ day-to-day, but employees want to get their work done, too. Give teams the time and space to meet their objectives, and recognize success when they do.

• Establishing routine check-ins: Recurring virtual meetings, weekly or even daily, with direct reports can benefit both the manager and the employee. They provide time to go over expectations, progress, roadblocks and deliverables, and also help build a more meaningful relationship, which ultimately leads to better work relationships.

• Intentionally manage your remote work culture: Remote work isn’t going to mirror in-office work. When employees are at home, they have access to their work at any time. A my-work-hours-may-not-be-your-work-hours understanding can be helpful, but it can also help to set core expectations. For example, studies show peak productivity times are between 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., so making those hours must-be-online times, with flex time on either side to accommodate the blurring work-life balance most workers experience, may strike a great balance for employees and managers.

3. Ensure they have the correct technology

Audit the company’s existing technology solutions to assure employees can do their work efficiently, securely and easily while out of the office. Begin by asking questions:

• Do team members have the computers and equipment necessary to efficiently do their jobs and communicate with their teams and customers?

• Do employees have reliable, secure internet access?

• Can they easily and securely access the internal information they need and use the core applications they depend on from anywhere?

• Is the information they have up to date, no matter where they’re working from?

• Do we, as a company, have the digital architecture in place to support a distributed workforce?

4. Build their digital confidence

People bring varying levels of digital confidence to remote roles. Assess employees’ comfort with the specific applications they’ll need to thrive, such as video conferencing tools. Provide training, including video conference best practices, and consider a company video-on/video-optional preference policy, which will set expectations for establishing connections.

5. Focus on improving processes and measuring outcomes

If your team is new to remote working, or has kept its old in-office process, then remote work offers an opportunity to reevaluate and optimize processes. This includes reassessing client engagement strategies to enhance service delivery and reduce operational costs in a digital environment.

Helping leaders in managing a remote team requires formerly on-site organizations to shift their thinking of how work happens. Encourage the team to focus on what needs to be accomplished and measuring output not by hours-worked, but rather by quality work completed.

Data security breaches are a major area of concern for chief security officers and chief information officers. To ensure remote teams remain secure, you should focus on people, technology and processes (according to McKinsey & Company’s “Cybersecurity tactics for the coronavirus pandemic.”)

Take a people-first security approach

Phishing, smishing, vishing, baiting — the list of socially engineered cyberattack tactics is long and frightening, primarily because most prey on human error. These threat campaigns target vulnerable systems and people, and with many people working remotely for the first time, vulnerabilities are at an all-time high. Security teams need to inform employees of the enhanced predation during a crisis, as well as reiterate any previous training to eliminate exploitation.

It’s beneficial for all to create an official remote working policy and do continual training on it. It should include policies around data security expectations, password protection and work expectations.

Assure employee technology is secure

Starting with secure home Wi-Fi, what may seem simple can be a large-scale problem. In an office setting, IT can control Wi-Fi settings, but employees’ home connections may not have strong protections in place, leaving organizational networks vulnerable to hacking. Create a plan for getting employees the equipment and assistance they need to keep data safe.

Utilize cloud security solutions with cloud delivery so employees have access to the information they need to do their jobs, and the information itself is protected. Leading cloud solutions provide secure data centers, encrypted in-transit connections, built-in redundancy, data replication, disaster recovery and even ongoing penetration and vulnerability testing.

When faced with a new work-from-home environment, employees may lean on unsanctioned shadow IT solutions to get around productivity obstacles. IT departments need to be ready to provide vetting, assistance, protection and sanctioned alternative solutions for employees looking to such workarounds.

While initiating multifactor authentication may be cumbersome on the front end, the security benefits do pay off. McKinsey and Company recommends a phased rollout that prioritizes users with elevated privileges and those who work with critical systems.

For employees who have never worked off site, logging into VPNs or authenticating necessary credentials can feel overwhelming and may be beyond their digital comfort zone. Consider adding capacity to the IT help desk so newly remote workers can get the help and support they need, when they need it.

Maintain a strong corporate culture

The values of an organization help define the type of work performed, and how it gets done. With employees remotely connected, it can be harder for teams to feel the strength of a company culture. To keep the company values visible and actionable, organizations need to stay committed to a delivering a positive employee experience that engages and recognizes valued work.

A modern content management system is vital for remote team management. Such systems provide secure, contextual access to information, supporting anywhere, anytime access and robust security measures like encryption and access policies. These features ensure remote teams can not only operate smoothly and securely, but also do their jobs as a part of an engaged, connected and productive corporate culture.

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