Managing any type of team takes skill and talent, but managing a remote team presents almost everybody’s unique challenge. It is especially difficult to make the transition from managing in-person to managing remotely. If you find it difficult to manage a remote team, there are tech tools out there that can help you ease this transition and enable you to manage more effectively from a remote location. These are the top 5.
1. Communication Platforms
The biggest challenge of managing a remote team of workers is communication. Communication is essential for all businesses – if you boil it down, the communication of ideas is the only way that humans have managed to build any technology, evolve any culture and develop any progress. This is as true in business as it is in society; effective communication helps a workforce innovate, stay creative, solve problems, and reduce their risk. Migrating to a remote team can pose unique challenges, but communication does not necessarily have to suffer – managers need to take full advantage of the tech tools available to them.
In some cases, these tools might be the hugely popular Slack, which was one of the biggest communications software on the market in 2020. However, experts are starting to warn that Slack is not a one-size-fits-all solution – just because it is popular does not mean it is the best for your business. See the article entitled Slack vs. Mattermost, which condenses the potential problems of using Slack in some specific industries and offers some useful alternatives that might suit you better.
2. Cloud Computing
Cloud computing feels like it was made for managing remote workers because it provides on-demand IT resources to any location. It is highly cost-effective because the need for hardware and infrastructure is outsourced so that you can scale conveniently with ease. Cloud services give remote employees 24/7 access to information they need to do their work; they allow you to manage cloud resources remotely, which means that you can easily give certain team members access to select resources – ensuring that you keep your information assets safe. Cloud computing is also highly scalable, which means that it can continue to grow and change as your remote team evolves.
3. Project and Task Management Tools
These tools allow your remote team to stay organized and hit their deadlines. It is an invaluable tool, one that helps keep you and your employees informed and updated with progress. It enables you to track how each employee is getting on to see any potential issues before turning into big problems. It also helps employees better understand the project on the whole, which helps with their wellbeing.
4. Human Resources and Payroll Management
HR and payroll management software takes the headache out of managing remote teams as it streamlines and automates many time-consuming processes. It also helps to keep up employee morale – which is especially important with remote working and avoids any internal issues that come from late payments. These make the managers life easier and improve employee wellbeing, which has a big impact on everything from productivity rates to customer satisfaction.
5. Feedback Tools
Feedback is very important – it keeps team members engaged and helps them grow professionally. There are tech tools on the market that have been designed to enable quick and effective feedback from managers of remote teams. Some of this software focuses on specific task-based feedback, and others instead check employee engagement and wellbeing rates.