The current coronavirus pandemic is striking most businesses. If businesses aren’t having financial issues, they’re facing logistical problems. In addition, they are concerned about how to manage their new remote team properly. Especially since everyone is being forced to work from home.
Working remotely can be tough. Particularly so, if your team members aren’t used to it. For those individuals who are finding it hard to stay motivated and productive when working from home, we’ve put together a guide to help. However, if remote team management is new to you, it may be challenging to know where to start. What tools should you use? How can you keep track of your team’s progress?
In this article, we’re going to show you what tools you need to manage your employees remotely. Plus how to ensure they’re working productively.
3 Remote Team Management Tools
When thinking of remote management tools, you need to consider the following:
- How are you going to communicate with your team?
- How are you going to track progress and productivity?
- What are you going to use for meetings?
All of these problems can be solved by using 3 tools.
Slack: Communicating with your team
Slack makes keeping in contact with your team easy. It is a simple dashboard that enables you to contact each of your team members one-on-one. It also allows you to set up multiple workspace channels for specific tasks or individual teams within your business.
For example, you can create a separate channel for managers, content creators, marketing, HR, etc., where each team can discuss tasks. This makes it super easy for you to oversee exactly what each team is doing or address any concerns that need addressing. It’s also a perfect way to arrange meetings.
Monday: Tracking progress
Monday is a well-known platform that helps managers organize their teams by assigning tasks and tracking progress. You can easily organize all projects by assigning specific tags, using deadlines, and automate a task’s workflow to minimize delays.
The interface is really intuitive and easy-to-use. It displays charts of all your team members, showing the tasks they’ve completed, the jobs in progress, and items that they’re stuck on. The automation tools enable you to set commands, such as automatically assigning the task to the editor once the designer has marked the job as complete.
Monday also has integrated time-tracking features that help you to monitor how long each team member is spending on any given project.
Zoom: Live video meetings
Zoom has become extremely popular over the last few months — mainly due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s a reliable video calling software that allows you to schedule and host meetings of over 100 people at once.
It uses HD video and also has a fantastic set of features for collaborating, including screen-sharing, keyboard and mouse takeover (perfect for managers wanting to show a team member how to complete a specific task), whiteboard functions, and the option for participants to ‘raise their hand’ to ask a question to the host.
The best thing about zoom is that, although a host needs an account, your team members don’t — so you can send them a link to join the chat with them having to create an account.
Preparing for Remote Management
First off, we genuinely hope you and your team are coping well in these challenging times. Many businesses feel like they’ve effectively been thrown out of their office (for the good of their health) and forced into remote working — with no prior experience.
It can be tough for people who have never experienced working from home. If you’re one of them or know that your team members are finding it difficult to stay motivated, send them our guide on working from home to help kickstart their productivity.
The 3 tools in this list will make the task of managing your remote team seamless — especially when you learn how to utilize all of the features each platform offers.
If you’d like to know more about how to improve yourself and your business as an entrepreneur, check out some of the latest blogs on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James