Engaging a team that works well together and trusts each other can raise team efficiency through the roof. If you’re new to leading a team remotely and want to help people feel connected and engaged, especially throughout a national lockdown, here’s 5 best management practices.
Be Available
Remote working does not come natural to everyone. As remote teams may feel disconnected, leaders need to make themselves available and share with their teams, when they have open time slots. Frequent check-ins with the team are a great way to help everyone overcome challenges that come with continuous remote working. Simply waiting for a team member to speak up may be too late.
Encourage Engagement
Create a virtual hub where your team can easily choose to collaborate and engage daily. Utilise your internal communication platforms to enable your team to start conversations and create dialogue amongst one another, this should help to replicate an office environment. At Virgin Incentives, we use our Slack technology platform to encourage different teams to create slack channels, which help everyone keep in touch socially and updated with one another.
Empower Your Colleagues
One of the ways you can increase team engagement is to set clear goals and desired results for your team. Once the goals have been defined, you should enable each team member to develop a plan of execution which will enhance their creativity and ownership. This will also allow your team to consider any training and personal development requirements they may have for their individual role.
Offer Flexibility
As each team member will have a different home environment and their own personal challenges with remote working, you should spend time to understand everyone’s unique circumstances. If possible, give your team working flexibility, whether that means changing people’s core working hours or prioritising and balancing their work projects. At Virgin Incentives we offer teams flexible working hours. As well as a healthy work-life balance, flexible working hours are a great benefit for our company culture and team morale.
Have a fun Team Experience
To keep your team engaged and motivated, add some fun into your team collaboration. From the comfort and safe social distance of all your homes, why not create a virtual event by choosing an interactive team experience.
From online cooking classes to arts and crafts sessions, and tutored gin tastings, there’s a fun experience for every team to try. Not only will such experiences show your team that you value their contribution, but it will also provide some much needed entertainment.
