Best practices for managing remote teams
Remote Staff Management Best Practices
Managing employees is challenging. Managing employees remotely is even more challenging and managing a distributed remote workforce can seem near impossible. Connext has been successful managing teams of all sizes and functions in this model for years and we have picked up many best practices that we preach to clients to help them manage remote and distributed teams. Here is a list of our ‘Remote Staff Management’ best practices to help you successfully manage your remote team. .
Well defined performance metrics and goalsDefining performance metrics and goals allows managers to measure productivity remotely, give constructive and qualitative feedback, and make frequent adjustments to help employees, and the overall organization, meet goals. For someone in the office, it is easy to look over and watch them working diligently at the assigned task. In a remote setting, that is just not possible. Therefore, we must set clear goals based on well thought out performance metrics and measure them. This not only helps management see exactly what is happening with their employees, it also gives employees direction and structure. Connext measures all employees on three basic metrics: productivity, utilization, and quality. Although, we have clients measuring employees on different metrics such as average handling time, title reports processed, or patient follow ups made. It doesn’t really matter which metric you choose if it can be clearly measured and aligns with your overall organizational goals.
Reporting on key performance indicators
The second part to well defined performance metrics and goals is reporting on those specific metrics. Consistent reporting allows near real time visibility into what is happening with the entire team and allows managers to make swift adjustments if needed. We typically send clients a weekly report on productivity, utilization, and quality. This gives the manager a weekly snapshot of what the team is doing and how they are functioning. If there is an issue with the data, the issue can be brought up and addressed immediately to avoid any long-term negative impact. Frequent reporting also allows managers to give frequent, constructive feedback based on real data which is incredibly helpful in driving employee performance.
Clear and well thought out processes
Well thought out and defined processes makes handing tasks over to a remote team much easier. Processes that are mapped out, tied to objectives and measurements, and have clear goals are easier to train, manage, and execute. Especially when onboarding a remote team who has little contextual knowledge of your organization, process definition is vital in ensuring a quick and easy start up to remote staffing. Having well defined processes also allows managers to pinpoint where something went wrong or where re-training is needed, allowing for swift course corrections and faster time to 100%, error free production.
Recurring stakeholder meeting
Having an established stakeholder meeting allows all parties involved to get together and discuss issues, wins, and opportunities to improve. It is critical in making sure that goals and incentives are aligned between all parties and that everyone is rowing toward the same objective. These meetings can be weekly, monthly, bi-weekly, or whatever is preferred but they need to happen. Without recurring stakeholder meeting it is easy for stakeholders to stray off of scope or not be aligned with their goals and objectives.
Achieving buy in from all key parties
In order for remote staffing to be successful, there needs to be buy in from all parties involved, especially at level where the most interaction with the remote staff will occur. A lot of times we see clients who have buy in at the executive level but not at the management level and the desired outcomes are either not met or delayed significantly. Our recommendation is to bring your managers and directors into the decision making process early and get their buy in. They will be working day in and day out with the remote staff so include them in the process mapping, interviews, and implementation meeting. Get them involved early and often and they will soon be bought into the process and the vision.
Developing a QA plan
A well thought out quality assurance plan gives you a path and framework to 100% production by your remote team. When remote employees first start performing a task, they should be audited frequently to ensure that the task is done correctly. As they become more proficient and experienced with that task, the audit frequency can decrease until it is not needed at all. That is the basis of a QA plan. Ensuring that when employees are performing new tasks, they are performing them correctly and if they aren’t, that there are functions in place to catch the errors and re-train the employee. Without a solid QA plan in place, your remote team could be committing consistent errors that you won’t catch until months later. This could have significant impacts on your business and your impressions of using a remote team.
Specific training plan tied to key tasks
Many outsourcing and remote staffing vendors can train remote staff on tasks like basic customer service, Office 365, or Microsoft Excel. However, it is imperative that organizations that look to remote staff set up a training plan tied to their specific key tasks. Each organization is different. Each organization has different key tasks and those key tasks have different processes. These tasks are often vital to the success of the organization and need to be thought out and detailed in a training plan that allows remote teams to grasp them quickly. Organizations that take a cookie cutter approach to training will have significant gaps in the capabilities of their remote team. If you want your team to integrate seamlessly into your organization, set up the training plan to make that happen.