Remote team management – how to deal with challenges

Remote team managers face challenges every day. From miscommunication and time zone differences to project/code management to technical issues – there’s a whole bunch of problems to deal with. Leading global teams that are scattered all over the world is hard but possible. To help you with this exciting but challenging journey, we’ve prepared some tips on remote team management.

• Change the way you persuade. When you discuss certain issues with your virtual team, not everyone will agree with your arguments. Distance, cultural differences, and lack of face to face communication will make the situation even worse. Here are some tactics of influence in remote team management that can help you lead through conflict in virtual teams.
• Tweak your text and phone communication tactics. Your fingers and your vocal cords are the main instruments that you use when communicating with your virtual team. Unfortunately, you are limited in terms of body language. That’s why you should get the most out of what you have. We put together some killer chat and phone techniques for managing remote teams to help you use text messages and calls for efficient communication.
• Reinvent the way you manage code. GitHub is not the only code management tool – there’s a wide variety of other tools on the market that can help you effectively control your coding projects. Here’s our curated list of tools for code management in a remote team. Additionally, you may find useful these 8 tools for work with remote developers.
• Manage time zone differences easily and efficiently. As your team may be distributed across the world, at first it may be hard to catch up with time zone differences, especially significant ones. Luckily, there are tools that are designed specifically for time zone management in remote teams.
• Embrace talent management. Human resources need to be managed in a co-located team, and virtual teams are not an exception too, so we prepared some tips on talent management in a remote team.
• Stop micromanaging. Micromanagement refers to constant check-ups with your team to make sure that everything goes right. It typically occurs due to the lack of trust in virtual teams and a high level of anxiety in managers. With virtual teams, you are even more likely to fall into this trap because you rarely see the faces of your employees. Therefore, it’s crucial to know how to stop micromanaging your remote employees.
• Listen to experts. Even the CEOs of the world’s tech giants make mistakes but still remain powerful. This is also true for virtual team leaders. The key to success as a virtual team manager is to do everything differently as you would in a co-located team. Here are some things CEOs of remote companies do differently and a list of the most known work-from-home companies.
• Improve team meetings. Meetings of a virtual team require a lot of preparation, from tools that you must choose to handle the differences in time zones. At the same time, you need facilitation skills to make virtual team meetings more effective and bridge the distance so the meetings feel real.
• Foster trust through communication. Communication and trust are the two main pillars of remote team management. Here are our recommendations on creating open, shared, and honest communication for trust within your remote team.
• Choose the right time tracking and online collaboration tools. There are plenty of time trackers and collaboration tools on the market, but in your case, it’s important to choose those that are tailored specifically to the needs of virtual teams. Feel free to use our ultimate guide to time tracking tools that will 10x remote employee productivity and a list of online collaboration tools for remote teams.
• Onboard your remote developers correctly. Yes, virtual employees also need onboarding, and the right onboarding process is often more important for them than for co-located employees who have an advantage – they can ask anyone for help at any time. For more information, see Onboarding a Remote Developer: Traps to Avoid and Tips for Success.

Now you have a better understanding of how to scale your team remotely and which tools to use to build the right culture in such teams.