These days, businesses use virtual teams for faster and better results. If you are already managing one or more virtual teams, you are not alone! A recent survey found that almost 83 percent of managers and executives want to increase intermittent or remote employees over the next 3 years. But managing virtual teams at times can be very challenging. Here are some effective strategies that you can use to successfully manage your virtual teams:
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Define Work Systems Well
Set work standard for your remote employees. Different individuals go about their jobs in different ways. If you set benchmark for work ahead of time, you can always save some time. Showing the employees the job at least once can make them understand their job easily.
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Make Communications Easy
Communication is always the key for any virtual team. There are so many communication tools these days. You can select the best ones as per your requirements. Use Skype for easy team communications, remove meetings, and screen sharing.
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Have Brief Daily and Weekly Virtual Meeting
To make sure you and your employees are on the same page and working toward achieving the same goal, having a daily meeting over skype or other communications platform can be very effective. You can have a fixed weekly meeting schedule as well. Choosing video calls over emails and chatting can make communications most effective and build a better relation among the team members.
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Use Premium Team Management Tools
Especially when your team gets larger, simply skype conversations might not be the most effective way to manage everything. You need something more structured such us Asana, Trello or BeeCanvas. These tools enable you to know how each tasks are being done by each employee.
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Don’t Forget The Free Tools
Google Drive, Spreadsheets are some free tools that can prove to be very handy especially when you deal with some documents that needs editing and updating on a regular basis by multiple individuals.
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Build Long Term Relations With Team Members
Getting results working together is always about knowing each other well and having a long lasting relation. When you know what each team member is capable of doing for the team, you can work with high confidence and get job done in time.
Conclusion
It is possible to manage a high performance virtual team without much efforts. You just need to know the right ways and use the right tools to do your job effectively.