A Guide to Help Effectively Managing Distributed Teams

This way of working has great benefits for business. It allows you to work with the very best people, no matter where they are, it saves on office overheads and it can result in a happier, more productive team.

That being said, there are challenges to managing distributed teams. It’s worth doing some research and preparation before you dive in.

Here, we’ll take you through some of the challenges of effectively managing distributed teams, and how you can solve them.

Communication

Communication is one of the major challenges for distributed teams. As well as the basic need to communicate work needs, remote teams often struggle with the lack of casual human interaction.

When you’re not regularly seeing one another in person, you don’t get to know one another as well as you might. This lack of general, friendly communication can have a dehumanizing effect. Rather than human teammates, you start to think of your fellow workers as cogs in the system. This has knock-on effects on everything from team morale to productivity and even job satisfaction.

For example, when someone has to take the day off for illness or family emergency, you get frustrated in the way you might when a computer program glitches, rather than feeling human empathy and compassion.

We’re focusing on the human element of communication here because it’s at the root of everything else. People are more likely to prioritise and even to properly take in work-based communications if they feel a sense of human connection to the person they’re talking to.

So, what’s the solution?

Build a courteous communicative culture

Emphasize communication within your team culture. Encourage team members to ask questions and share issues. Promote a friendly tone, and always seek a compassionate explanation for any issue before jumping to recriminations.

If you can, schedule regular video meetings. It’s important that team members can put a face to the email signature. Video chats are better than anything else for helping remote teams to connect on a human level.

What’s more, as 93% of human communication is non-verbal, you get much more comprehensive communication from video chats.

So, schedule regular video chats, to help your team connect more deeply and to communicate more effectively.

Tech

One of the big advantages of an office is that all the tech you need is right there. Things are a bit more complicated with a distributed team.

A distributed team may be using a wide variety of devices and platforms, not all of which will be compatible. And when this tech breaks down, there’s no IT department on hand to come up and fix it.

Then there’s the cybersecurity issue. In this day and age, it’s vital that your cybersecurity systems are absolutely impenetrable. That’s not even an easy thing to achieve when all your tech is in one place. It’s much, much harder when your company's tech is scattered across the world and in various differing formats.

So, what’s the solution?

Impose technological consistency

We’re not going to sugarcoat this: tech problems will keep coming up. But this would be the same in a physical office space - it’s the nature of tech! Sure, it’s a bit more complicated when your team is distributed, but, ultimately, you deal with it in the same, case by case way.

To give yourself a fighting chance, it’s important that you have a degree of consistency. For example, it’s a lot easier to predict and fix Apple device problems if you’re all working from Apple devices. If you’re working from a mix of Apple, Android and PC, you add an extra layer of diagnostic complication to any problem.

You may have to spend some cash to make sure that all your workers are using the same devices. It’s also worth investing in some SaaS cloud subscriptions to ensure that you’re all working on the same platforms, and maybe even CSaaS (CyberSecurity as a Service) to keep your systems secure.

Sure, this kind of expenditure on remote tech is a burden on the budget, but it’s not as expensive as renting and kitting out an office space – and it’s worth it to keep your business safe and productive.

Trust

If you’re accustomed to managing a physical office, trust can be a real issue. How can you know that your team members are working as they should when you can’t physically see what they are doing?

Similarly, how can you be sure that they aren’t (for example) getting drunk while they work? Or leaving screens showing sensitive information open in public? Or simply getting distracted and not giving their all to the task at hand?

When your job is to ensure team productivity and satisfaction, being unable to physically manage that team can be tough.

So, what’s the solution?

Judge by the results

Like it or not, one of the things that people love about remote working is that they don’t feel micromanaged. They are more in control of their own time and space, which brings a lot of job satisfaction.

Rather than worrying about what your team members are doing at every moment of the day, judge their productivity by the results. If they complete tasks on time and to a high quality, then whatever they are doing is clearly working (in both senses of the word!).

When things like punctuality and productivity start to slide, that’s the time to step in and flex your management muscles.

Of course, you may want to put in some standards and regulations just to make it clear where the line lies. Things like NDAs can prevent team members from sharing sensitive information. Codes of conduct can set out reasonable behavioral expectations. But don’t go overboard with this.