Mastering remote employee management: How to set up your team for success

What’s the difference between a good remote manager and a great remote manager?

Some answers probably sound familiar. Effective delegation. Clear, constructive feedback. Strong time management. These practices are tried and true for all types of managers, but when you’re leading a remote team, they may not be enough.

Remote team management involves the same best practices as any other managing job, but you’ll need a few extra tools in your toolbox too. Using an intelligent productivity platform like Slack can help keep your remote and hybrid team members connected, organized and productive, even when they’re oceans away.

Let’s explore some strategies for remote employee management to help you become an even stronger team leader.

What is remote employee management?

Managing a team is demanding enough on its own. Throw in differing locations, time zones and in-office work schedules, and the job gets even more complex.

Remote workforce managers oversee teams of remote and hybrid employees. Fully remote teams might never work together in person, and hybrid team members might have different schedules for coming into the office. Either way, remote work brings a unique set of challenges to every team and manager.

What makes a good remote team manager?

To become a successful remote manager, you should first know what it takes to be a successful remote employee. This means prioritizing results over seat time.

Outside of synchronous virtual meetings, it’s up to your remote team members to manage their time—and that kind of autonomy involves a lot of trust. The best remote managers empower their employees to do their jobs and meet their deadlines rather than requiring them to log on during specific hours.

Challenges of managing a remote workspace

Managing employees in a digital workspace poses some tough questions. How can you hold your remote employees accountable? How should you monitor their work progress? And how do you keep from crossing the line into micromanaging?

On top of traditional management best practices, managing remote and hybrid employees requires technological solutions, an intentional virtual workspace and strategic scheduling to get your distributed team on the same wavelength.

Tips on how to manage a remote team

Let’s turn to Slack’s manager’s manual for digital work for some specific tips on managing remote employees:

Support asynchronous communication

Remote managers should encourage ongoing communication among their team members. In between live meetings, team conversations can be asynchronous, allowing members to respond in their own time. Productivity platforms like Slack make it easy for remote teams to keep in touch across different locations and work hours.

As a manager, you can set boundaries and expectations to support your team’s asynchronous communications. You might ask team members to respond to Slack messages within one business day or contain focused discussions in dedicated Slack threads to limit unnecessary notifications.

Stay visible and approachable

Find ways to show up for your team. Consider setting office hours and scheduling regular 1-on-1s with each team member.

Employees should know when and how to reach you outside of meetings too, so ensure that you’ve added the right team members to the right Slack channels to keep in contact about specific projects and initiatives.

Balance support with accountability

Be ready to assist when needed, but avoid the urge to micromanage. Striking the right balance can foster mutual trust and minimize hand-holding without leaving your team members floundering. Track action items and stakeholders in a Slack canvas, for example, to make sure everyone understands their responsibilities as they work independently.

Make yourself clear

Err on the side of over-explaining when assigning tasks in a remote team. Avoid making assumptions, and drive home key points. Ask explicit questions, like, “What am I leaving out?” Focus on clear action items, making sure that each one has a specific owner and deadline.

Prioritizing projects and performance

As a remote team manager, your biggest responsibilities are project management and performance management. Once you master these remote job functions, the rest will fall into place.

Project management for remote teams

Project management involves overseeing the actual tasks your remote team is working on. From development through implementation—design drawings through quality control testing—any aspect of a team task falls under project management.

Performance management for remote teams

Performance management refers to how a project is run, including assignments, scheduling and organizational objectives. If you’re addressing the question of how to get things done in your digital workplace, you’re managing performance.

Maximizing collaboration with remote team management tools

Managing in a digital space requires the right digital tools. Slack’s apps and integrations gather some of the best remote team management tools in one productivity platform, making it simple and convenient to keep your distributed team on the same page.

Workflow Builder

Slack’s Workflow Builder helps managers streamline both project and productivity management. You can use Workflow Builder to automate routine processes—such as filing a help desk ticket, sending onboarding materials to new team members and creating briefs—directly in Slack.

Workflow Builder also integrates with third-party apps like Jira and PagerDuty, allowing users to manage data from multiple sources in one collective space.

Channels

Slack channels are organized, collaborative communication spaces for dedicated teams and initiatives. Use channels to organize and manage discussions about specific projects, groups‌ and topics to keep your workflows clean and conversations relevant.

Within every channel, members can view all conversations and shared documents, and all conversations automatically become a searchable archive for later use.

Huddles

Designed to feel like you’re working in the same room, Slack huddles let you collaborate spontaneously and informally with your colleagues. Instead of scheduling a formal meeting and drawing up an agenda, you can hop on a quick huddle right in Slack. Users can share screens and video streams or keep their discussions audio-only.

When a huddle ends, all shared messages, documents and links are automatically saved for future reference. You can initiate a huddle instantly in either a channel or a DM.

Clips

If you need to send updates or announcements to team members in different time zones, Slack clips let you get the job done asynchronously. Compile an audio or video message—such as a tutorial, walkthrough or recorded meeting—and post it to the relevant channel in Slack. Members can then access the clip at their convenience, including a transcript and captions.

Onboarding remote employees

Onboarding can get overwhelming for both the new hire and their manager, and it’s easy for details to fall through the cracks—especially when the process happens remotely.

Managers can consider the following tips for onboarding new hires remotely:

• Create a special Slack workspace just for new hires
• Record live onboarding sessions and repost them in the new hire space
• Create a triage-style help channel for new hires, and set your notifications for that channel to the highest urgency
• Distribute an onboarding checklist to channel members so everyone knows exactly what to do when
• Use Workflow Builder to create interactive messages for your new hires

Putting it all together

Managing a remote or hybrid team requires a results-oriented mindset, ultra-clear communication, intentional support and a balanced management style. An intelligent productivity platform like Slack can help remote managers streamline their processes and organize asynchronous communication to promote trust, accountability, collaboration and productivity.