When you as a manager have to manage a team that works remotely, you face a number of challenges. We discuss these challenges and explain how you can best deal with them.
Challenge of remote work: Communication with the team
The first challenge of working remotely for a manager is communication with your employees. If you as an employer want to keep control over your employees while they work remotely, communication is very important. When your employees work remotely, you don’t know exactly how they perform or what they do, is right. That is why clear communication between manager and employee is very important.
A way to avoid communications problems is having a chat. The manager and the employee can communicate quickly when needed. An important thing is that the manager and employee are every day available by chat.
It is nice for the employees and manager to be clear about what is expected and what the goals are. It is useful to record this in an online document that the employee and employer have access to and can always fall back on.
Problems with planning
Another challenge of working remotely is planning. When your employees from different countries work remotely, as a manager you have to deal with different time zones. This can make it difficult to plan a meeting with the whole team.
A possible solution is to schedule the meeting when everyone is at work. This can be due to the different time zones for one at the beginning of the day, and for the other at the end. If this is not possible, you can record the meeting, so the employees can watch it back later.
Monitor employee’s performance when working remotely
As a manager, it is difficult to track employee performance when working remotely. it is also difficult to see how productive an external employee is. That’s why it is important to make clear agreements with the employee about deadlines and the expected results, so that the employee knows what is expected of him and the employer knows what to expect.