Not only are employees more satisfied, but remote teams can also help businesses save money and increase productivity. Research has shown remote workers are up to 40% more productive than their in-office colleagues.

For startups, hiring a remote team makes a lot more sense than investing in office space and trying to find the right talent nearby. A startup can't afford to waste any resources. Everything needs to be leveraged to the max.

Although remote work can be beneficial, it still comes with certain challenges that can bring you or your business down if not addressed properly. Fortunately, there are certain steps you can take to avoid failure and make your remote team succeed.

Establish trust among workers right away

When you hire and establish a remote team, you first must take the right steps to build trust among team members. Employees, team managers, and directors will all have to rely on each other. They need to be confident that the person they depend on will complete their task on time and that everyone else will pull their own weight. 

While every team has its leaders, you also need to make sure that power and responsibilities are distributed the right way. As Nancy Lockwood writes in HR Magazine, a remote team has to “share power.” Managers need to trust employees and give them the freedom to work and make decisions independently.,  

Sure, you shouldn’t leave people completely unmonitored. But still, micromanagement shouldn’t be encouraged. People don’t like working while having to look over their shoulders all the time. Instead, focus on helping team members have a clear vision of what they are working towards and offer them guidance if needed.

Provide guidelines and set expectations

Managers have lots of responsibilities. If they spend the bulk of their time babysitting employees, explaining what they need to do, managers won’t be able to do their job properly. To hold every team member accountable and optimise their productivity, you need to set expectations and provide clear guidelines. 

A person that knows what’s expected of them won’t waste too much time asking questions. And when you’re working remotely, even asking a simple question can take a long. So you should try to answer as many questions in advance as possible.

How much work is expected to be completed each week? How do you measure the productivity of your remote workers? How often do workers need to report progress on certain tasks? These are some of the basics you need to address in your guidelines. By explaining everything, you’ll ensure your remote team stays at the top of its game. 

Helping every team member develop

This might seem like a no-brainer, but we still need to discuss it. Ongoing training and development should be part of every remote team's strategy. Young workers value workplace development even more than you may realise. For 60% of millennials, the opportunity to learn and grow on the job is possibly the biggest criterion when choosing a job.

However, it's not all about the millennials. No matter the age, experience, or background, workplace development is something that every employee values, whether they work remotely or in-office. So what can you actually do to nurture development?

Use some of the tools the Internet has to offer. For instance, explainer videos can help them understand the company's processes and procedures better. Online webinars allow you to train your teams on specific topics without them being in the same location.

Establish communication channels

Good communication is important in any business setting. One advantage of an office setting is that you can easily set your employees aside to exchange a few words if needed. Misunderstandings happen in traditional offices, sure. However, they’re much easier to address and resolve in person. They’re often resolved in minutes. 

When you’re working remotely, solving a simple problem may take a couple of hours, especially if you have people in different time zones. For nearly a fifth of remote workers, team communication is the biggest problem they encounter. To combat this, you need to establish channels that will make communication seamless.

If you want to make collaboration easier for your team members:

• Establish a platform that will help team members send direct messages to each other. Slack and Microsoft Teams are two popular options.
• A platform for tracking tasks and managing projects is a must-have. Depending on your workflow, you can pick either Trello or Asana for it.
• For client communication, you don't need anything special. Email and Zoom will do the job, depending on how much communication is needed.

Consider having weekly or bi-weekly meetings online and use those to keep everyone in the loop. That can and probably will prevent any potential misunderstandings.

Closely measure team results

In most organisations, people who do the most work tend to be quiet and subdued. That's because they choose to focus on their work and contribute to the team's results instead of talking about it. But when you see that someone doesn't involve themselves in team meetings or that they spend a lot of time "offline," you might think that they're not putting in enough work.

To avoid any confusion, you need to find ways of measuring team success. A one-on-one assessment may help in certain situations. However, for the most part, you need to find tools and systems that will help you track progress.

There are multiple options for measuring team results. First off, you have time-tracking software like Toggl and Harvest, that’s fantastic for tracking billable hours. It also gives you a good idea of the amount of time your employees spend on certain tasks.

And that’s not it. If you need some expert help, you can hire a part-time director to help your employees stay productive and motivated. To find the right person, visit Boardroom Advisors. They have more than 150 remote directors that can help you with everything from basic goal setting to measuring KPIs. 

Closing thoughts

In today's business world, having a remote team can help you hire cream-of-the-crop talent, lower operation costs, and improve productivity. All of these things will help your startup get off the ground quicker. But you need to ensure that your remote team members click.

Without a unified vision and a sense of purpose, you'll just be stuck with a bunch of people that don't have any reasons to collaborate. Managing a remote team, luckily, isn't that complicated. By following our tips, you'll be able to put the team members in a position to succeed.