How to Manage a Remote Team if You’ve Never Done It Before

Vita Baryshnikova is a Head of HR at Skyeng where 90% of employees and contractors work remotely. Vita shares her experience of creating effective processes for remote teams. These simple tips can help you prevent burnout and add transparency to your work.

Obvious and not-so-obvious tips for teams that have never worked remotely

With remote work, all the basic management rules double in power. Charisma, personal qualities, and informal interactions in the break room become irrelevant. Management skills and self-discipline are the two things one can rely on.

Unfortunately, self-discipline cannot be improved on the spot — you have to work with what you already have. But management tricks are easy to learn and use right here and right now.

Know what your employees are doing the next quarter/month/week/day

If you cannot see your employees’ plans for the next week and don’t know how they match the team’s goals, your system is not transparent enough and you might find it hard to work remotely.  

In the perfect world, you would already be using Jira, Asana, or any other task manager. If you don’t, it’s ok. Don’t start now; it’s a long process. Better choose simple tools that don’t require hours of training to use. 

Trello is a good place to start. Create a team board with columns for each employee. One card in a column will stand for one day. Inside each card, make a checklist for tasks for the day. Monthly plans can be stored in a Google Doc (here’s a neat template).

Time required: 30 mins for installation + 1 h for setting up and training

New rules for the team

Call a team meeting and compile a list of new rules. Listen to suggestions from the team. They know what will work best for them.

Important questions to discuss:

1. What are the rules for conference calls?
   At Skyeng, they are the following: come on time, use video chat, make sure people can see and hear you, send links and docs with accesses prior to the meeting, write down agenda and follow-up.
2. How do we keep each other up-to-date? Should we meet more often or introduce new team reports? How can we feel 10/10 engaged?
   What we do at Skyeng: weekly meetings with brief reports and no presentations. The report covers this week’s KPI values, successes, failures, and plans for the next week. Plus each employee has a face-to-face meeting with the team leader once a week.
3. What channels of communication do we use?
   If you used to communicate only via email, now it might be a good time to switch to a messenger like Slack, Rocket, or Telegram. They allow connecting instantly, almost like in an office. Vote whether or not unscheduled phone calls are ok. They might be extremely efficient for some but also extremely stressful for others.

Your job as a team leader is to ask those questions and create new rules for the new reality without losing productivity.

How to control remote workers

Remote work puts productivity into focus: you judge it only by result, with no interference from emotions or personal charisma. That’s why I think you shouldn't control remote workers. Control the results.

That makes your task easier. It’s basic management: set point A, choose point B, and make sure the goal is measurable, attainable, and time-bound.

Set controls points and rules for them. For example, your employee submits a task report each Friday at 7 p.m. or updates the status in a task manager. Choose any tools and rules you find useful. 

What we do at Skyeng:

1. Weekly. Team meetings every Friday, regular face-to-face meetings once a week.
2. Monthly. Team leaders submit a report on their team.
3. Daily. Project and development teams hold daily stand-ups for 15–30 mins to sync and update on the progress.

We also use GeekBot. It’s a bot for Slack that asks each team member about their results and plans and then posts the answers as reports in an open channel. The bot is very simple to install and use.

Prevent burnout when working remotely

With remote work, the line between your professional and personal life gets blurred. Make it clear again by keeping to a schedule. Set rules for yourself. For example, I don’t check work chats after 10 p.m. and always go for a 10-minute walk with my dog during lunch break.

At the company level, we work both to prevent burnout and deal with it. For prevention, each new hire takes a course on remote work at our corporate university. 

We also hire certified coaches to help managers deal with burnout. It sounds like a whim, but for us, it’s economically justified. One hour with a coach costs less than hiring a new manager. Plus it reduces stress for the team.

How to detect conflicts in a remote team

Don’t cut out personal communication — always use video chat. When working remotely, communication becomes more intense as there’s no illusion of availability. You have only one hour for a meeting and have to discuss everything you need.

At Skyeng, questions about emotional and psychological state open and close each face-to-face meeting.

90% of conflicts at work stem from unarticulated expectations people and teams have about each other or contradicting rather than complementing KPIs. Both these misunderstandings can be resolved online. Even more than that, remote interactions are a little less emotional than personal ones — and it’s great for conflict resolution.

Some tips on time management for remote work

At the office, you had to manage your schedule too. But now there’s another challenge — to separate work and personal life.

My solution is a separate workspace devoted solely to work and noise-canceling headphones plus some time-management techniques.

At the moment, I’m trying the 3/4–2–3/4 schedule.

I divide my time into three chunks with long breaks between them.

Morning: work for 3 hours, from 7/8–11 a.m.

Then a 2-hour break: I run errands, work out, walk the dog

Lunchtime: work from 1–3 p.m.

2-hour break

Evening: work from 7–9/10 p.m.

If I need to work for more than 9 hours, I can start at 7 a.m. and finish at 11 p.m. The intervals during the day are fixed. 

For concentrated work, I use the Pomodoro technique: 25 mins of work followed by 5–7 minutes of intensive rest and exercise.