The do's and don'ts of managing a remote workforce 

Managerial roles always come with never-ending challenges and obstacles that demand on-the-spot flexibility and decisiveness. Especially in a world undergoing mass digital transformation, the rules of yesterday may become obsolete overnight. 

Take the way we work, for example. For decades, work, especially by white-collar workers, has been constricted to the office. Sure, this work paradigm has undergone erosion over the years, but no drastic shift in the regional or international landscape had taken root. 

Enter the COVID-19 pandemic, and nearly overnight, remote working quickly established itself as the new norm. 

For many managers, this was uncharted territory. How would they be able to monitor staff? How would they be able to track deliverables? How would they be able to engage in effective teamwork if everybody was stuck behind a screen? The reality of the situation was daunting. 

Here are some do’s and don’ts manager needs to be aware of when it comes to managing their remote workforces. 

Don’t: Micromanage your team

Losing sight of your employees and having to lead and direct them across miles and through speakers and screens can sound like a nearly impossible task, especially for senior managers that have been doing things traditionally for decades. 

Still, you need to avoid micromanaging your team, as nothing can get on the nerves of an employee and decrease productivity more than an incessant and controlling manager. 

Do: Promote results and reasonable check-ins

What you’ll want to do is to promote a culture of trust, where you set deadlines and expect results, regardless of where and when they are being completed. Remote working means staff can attend to personal responsibilities and home duties like doctor appointments, child-rearing, and more. Don’t feel compelled to check in on them every waking minute, but instead hold them accountable when it comes to deliverables. Additionally, you can set reasonable check-in meetings, calls or whatever suits your needs to keep the whole team up to date with one another, and to reinforce collaboration. 

Don’t: Request tasks past working hours

Giving staff permission to remote work doesn’t mean you can or should take advantage of their time. They might be at home, at a cafe or on a workation, but they still have working hours that you have assigned them as per their contract, and they are not legally obligated to work beyond those hours.

Do: Respect working hours and boundaries

If you need tasks done past working hours, make sure you compensate staff with overtime pay, or bonuses when the work is non-quantifiable. Otherwise, business owner and/or manager should respect the boundaries of their employees, as they have their own personal struggles and responsibilities to handle that go beyond making you and your company more money. 

Don’t falsely advertise remote working perks 

A common feature of many job advertisements as of late is the inclusion of the capacity for remote working as a perk. This ‘perk’ is often wrongly advertised or overly simplified just to lure in new hires, when in many cases it means that companies just want an excuse to underpay a potential candidate living abroad (a common misdeed by companies that prefer cheap outsourcing), or want them to work beyond legal working hours.

Do: Set a clear framework for how remote working is handled by your company 

If you want to support remote working within your company, and want to advertise this fact when screening new hires, make sure you define a clear framework for what your company’s exact definition of remote work is, what tasks and responsibilities are expected from staff in this configuration, what hours they’re expected to work, how the company will track progress and monitor its staff, and more. As with any relationship, you need to set expectations from the start with full transparency. 

Don’t: Rely on unwieldy or problematic communication tools

As a manager in a digitally evolving world, you need to learn to use the tools at your disposal to the best of your ability. Resist the urge to call or text a staff member every time you need something done or if something goes wrong. This is a no-no in any relationship, professional or otherwise. 

Do: Utilise effective productivity tools and solutions 

Instead, you’ll want to utilise the myriad of easy and affordable productivity and team management tools at your disposal. Software like Slack, Trello, Monday, Zoho and many others make tracking tasks, deliverables and staff easy, seamless and unintrusive. In most cases, everyone has visibility on what everyone else is working on, which promotes equality and fairness vertically and horizontally across the company hierarchy. This mostly eliminates the culture of singling out certain staff or making them feel like they’re being targeted for undue monitoring or judgment.

Don’t: Haphazardly hire or hire cheap

With remote working in the mix, it is much more hazardous to hire carelessly or cheaply (as in opting for younger inexperienced hires who you can pay less to cut costs as opposed to paying more for an experienced professional). There is only so much you can infer from puffed-up CVs and pre-prepped interview responses, and making a wrong judgment on a person can cause significant issues for your company.

Do: Properly screen and test candidates and gauge their independence and sense of responsibility

Vet and interview potential hires carefully and diligently before signing them on, especially since they will be working remotely in a partial or full capacity. While it is possible to get a sense of a person when working with them physically in an office and engaging with them, it becomes much more difficult to do so when the only thing you’re engaging with from the other person is their face on a screen and their voice from a speaker. Work is still a very human affair, and misjudging a hire that turns out to be needy, irresponsible, unpunctual or unprofessional can derail your company.