10 obligatory skills for remote team manager

Managing a remote team provokes reasonable questions. Which strategy should be chosen and which personal and professional qualities could help to implement the strategy? In fact, a remote team manager, who wants to be effective, needs a set of necessary skills.

1. Build your own team values.

It can sound weird, but nowadays only a few managers tell each developer or another IT-specialist, how important their job is for the final product. Implementation of such a simple task helps workers to realize their self-worth and importance for the company. Also, setting common goals helps your team to prosper. Because everybody combines their own and general goals. It brings added value, no less important than the financial reward.

Main features of making own values for remote team

• A similar attitude to work, but not identical.
• The powerful emotional connection between colleagues.
• Improvement of the relationships with the manager, who is perceived as the team leader.
• Breaking the emotional disjunction.

2. Create a communication strategy.

According to the Business 2 Community, in 2020 before the start of Pandemy, there were 7 million remote workers. This number is growing steadily. Therefore, remote team managers need to create a powerful communication strategy. Do not reinvent the wheel! Just use a set of standard communication tools. It’s a good idea to organize personal meetings in the office once a week or at least once a month. If such meetings of remote team members are impossible, find a possibility for face-to-face meetings. Such an approach improves the relationships between team members, helps to prioritize tasks, to find out solutions of urgent issues and side goals.

Keep in mind that the manager should stay in touch with the team, be open for the contacts, but not get bogged down in micromanaging. Try to find balance! For example, a useful schedule includes one general meeting per day to discuss and check the progress. It should save time by reducing the number of face-to-face meetings.

NOTE: make the communication strategy taking into account that a video conference is 30% more efficient than audio one. It can help each team member to understand the manager’s expectations.

3. Make your watchful eyes ready.

Does your team need severe monitoring and control? It’s the typical question. The answer depends on developers who have different personal features. Anyway, a flexible schedule gives a lot of freedom. Some team members relax and don’t work at full strength. They do not cope with such a way of working. It leads to loss of productivity.

Successful manager is able to confront this challenge and to monitor the results and time frames. You can try different managerial approaches: severe control and light-touch style. Their effectiveness is directly connected to the frames of time and the project’s complexity. Comparing both strategies, figure out the best one, but take into consideration that severe control is more risky. Stick with it, while you’re preparing metrics and management systems. Reliable tools help to improve personal efficiency and to establish powerful collaboration: Trello, Pomodoro, Toggl, Todoist.

4. Improve your soft skills.

Obviously, you need the set of soft skills for managing remote employees:

✓Background in matchmaking.

✓The ability to adjust to various team members, including introverts, who are more likely to work on their own.

✓Advanced listening skills (while communicating you should clearly understand your colleague, his expectations and fears, you should be aware of, how to further clarify information and in which way to paraphrase and to interpret it).

✓Be good in decision making and be ready to bear responsibility for them.

✓Strong emotional intelligence. Non-empathetic managers can come up to the great obstacles while working with the team. They can’t hear and understand their team members, collaborate with their problems and make the whole process run smoothly.

5. Make sure you know how to organize lucrative, cost-effective job in strictly defined terms.

Literate managing a remote team helps to reduce costs. The manager should be able to organize it in accordance with the plan, roles, responsibilities and deadlines. Such a feature illustrates strong managerial capabilities because the ability to save up money and time helps to prosper in other working areas, for example, in team management.

The market statistics shows that remote work has lots of benefits for companies and workers

6. Focus on your own purposes and the one’s of your team members, try to make them work together for the flawless result.

Remote team managers need to remember their goals, see the general picture and find the right ways to prosper. When teams are meeting the goals of the manager, it’s quite simple to work with the product and to make it better. If not, manager should be able to put all the purposes together in order they work towards achieving a common goal. Effectiveness of team members grows when they associate company success with their own.

How to motivate the team members?

• Pay a fair salary. Raise it, when the worker has reached a new level.
• Provide opportunities for self-development and career movement.
• Foster the contacts inside the team.
• Create a positive, friendly atmosphere with the maintenance of subordination.

7. Ensure access to the centrally available information.

Remote team managers should be available all day round, but sometimes there is a need to unload them in order to provide access to the centrally available information. This information is related to the requirements and other data provided by customer, general documentation, meetings and iterations plan. Such an approach will reduce the number of extra communication.

8. Use modern technologies.

The main aim for the manager while working with remote employees is to keep them motivated. The second task is to achieve this for a long period. The main secret of achieving that result can be using modern technologies. They are usually connected to video conferences, different communication and control services, task applications:

• Zoom.
• Slack.
• Join.me.
• Skype.
• UberConference.
• Proofhub.
• Apollo.
• Google Apps.
• Asana.
• Canva for Work.
• Screen Leap.
• Mikogo.
• Wunderlist.
• Harvest and other apps for time tracking.

The main task for the manager during the selection of modern technologies is providing sufficient results with limited resources (time, budget, team professionalism). This aim is the same for any remote team manager. It’s also important to find tools, which are in line with an ongoing project. The list of apps could be extended or reduced at any time.

9. Be consistent.

Any leader must be consistent and disciplined. These are the obligatory characteristics for remote team managers. Because when you cancel meetings at the last moment, do not stay in touch with the team, people can feel the lack of interest in active work. They stop to associate themselves and their personal success with the company. Also, lots of IT-specialists tell that the manager, who is not disciplined, provokes the feeling of being cut from the company. To avoid the problem, remote team manager should give team members a new sense of security, be consistent and demand the same from others.

10. Trust your team.

If the manager has found reliable specialists, it’s time to get them acquainted with remote job rules in the company. Then they should receive enough freedom. Do not disturb them all the time. Few meetings and check-ins per day are a bad influence on team efficiency. Such a situation means that manager focuses rather on activity than results. But the confident leader must trust workers after they have passed input selection during employment. It helps them to stay engaged without any problems with discipline. The manager here may be associated with the bridge between company and team, who represents the interests of both sides. Anyway, there is also a third side. Goals of the customer should be always considered, but without any harm to the team. It’s quite complicated. Therefore, managing remote workers is something similar to craft and art. Their improvement is possible in the case of regular practice.

Trust your team is the prudent approach. This is supported by independent specialists in the management area. For example, the famous author Bill Effinger in his articles tells why the successful manager should organize not severe control, but the free exchange of thoughts and efforts with the team. If you connect such an approach with patience and skill to be grateful, the relationships inside the team will be healthy and long-lasting.

Conclusions

In summary, there are a set of skills, which are important for the remote team manager. Flawless communication should be combined with discipline, ability to trust, to motivate and to show your team members common goals.