How to keep your virtual team motivated and productive
Virtual teams have become a fact of business life. But making them work effectively? Not as easy as it sounds.
If you’re managing a virtual team, it’s important to understand best practices of remote working so that you can ensure your team is engaged, motivated, and productive. And who wouldn’t want that?!
Here are a few tips that will help you figure out how your virtual team can be just as effective as if everyone was in-office.
Communication
This is one of the biggest challenges all remote teams have: How do you get the same benefit outside the office as you did when you were in the office?
You need to over-communicate. Keeping everyone in the loop requires a little extra intentionality when everyone is working virtually.
One important thing you need to think about is HOW everyone is going to receive information. As some examples, you can think about using electronic newsletters, electronic announcements, private groups, social media channels, Slack, or OneNote (this is a great place to create agendas and meeting minutes).
Ultimately, whatever platforms you use, everyone needs to know and understand how to use them and where to go to get information. So, get everyone on the same page about this. Ideally, having a central location for information will be most effective.
Another idea you might want to consider is having more one-on-one meetings. Since you can no longer just drop by someone’s office, you may need to schedule more one-on-one meetings to effectively communicate.
Technology
This may seem obvious, but many people actually don’t have all the right technology. Your team needs to have good devices, good cameras, and all the proper programs and platforms needed to receive information.
Also think about things like good IT access support and internet connection. If any individual doesn’t have these things, they’ll just get lost and it will be hard for them to work effectively.
More Virtual Team Tips
Of course, these aren’t the only tips required to make your virtual teams work. I have a few more suggestions to share with you, so I’ve created a video that goes into detail on all of them. If you’re managing virtual teams, then you need to hear these tips to make sure your teams stay engaged and productive.
Follow me over to YouTube and we’ll finish this conversation there!
-Adriana
