How to be a good remote manager
Remote managing can be a huge shift from managing in an office. For first time managers especially, the learning curve can take you right out of your comfort zone. There is a much higher burden on the manager to create systems that your team can be successful, and held accountable in.
Recruiting is tough, because you want to be sure you’re ending up with a candidate that has a great work ethic and is ready to produce without hand holding – and hiring freelancers can be even harder. Performance assessment is also tougher, because there’s less transparency overall.
Thankfully, there are a few key characteristics of great remote managers that will set you – and your team – up for success.
Good remote managers do these 8 things
Honor your 1:1s. There’s a war on meetings right now, and rightly so – ”meeting creep” is real and can cut into productivity in real ways. But your one-on-one with your remote direct report is the one chance you get to do the next 3 things on this list: communicate key things, build trust, and listen. Honor your 1:1s, and don’t be late unless it’s understood already you’ll be late. Nothing sends a message of “you are not valuable” like regularly skipping your 1:1s. Instead, reschedule them and reduce the cadence, or switch to a hybrid format. But don’t skip.
Over communicate. Good remote managers make a daily effort to communicate clearly and frequently with your team. Start with a daily 15 minute standup, celebrate wins, provide context whenever possible to the “why” behind decisions, and summarize achievements and plans. With you leading the cadence for communication, expectations will be set for how often employees should communicate as well. Be a great role model and use public channels, and teach your employees how to push information to you, so you don’t have to pull it out of them.
Build trust. Remote teams can often feel isolated and disconnected. Foster team camaraderie with icebreakers and virtual get-to-know-yous. Schedule dedicated social events and check in with team members one-on-one just to ask, “how are you?” As the team builds trust with one another, they will be more proactive in reaching out, asking questions, and moving things forward on their own.
Just listen. By listening for long periods without interrupting, you are teaching your employee that they can safely be honest with you, share their concerns and ideas, and work out their own problems by bringing you into the mix for advice. Listening is the foundation of creating a psychologically safe workplace and ensuring trust between you and your team members. Don’t underestimate the power of listening intently.
Use as few tools as possible to do the job effectively. Keep it simple. You need: Project management software, video and chat software, Analytics, internal documentation like Notion, Confluence or Gsuite, and then whatever each individual department needs to perform their functions. Overloading your team with different SaaS tools is going to be overwhelming and counterproductive, especially if they conflict (EG: don’t use Notion to store documentation but something else for meeting notes). You can make very functional to-do lists with simple Google sheets templates.
Set clear priorities. What does success look like in 6 months? Knowing this vision and then working backwards from there, helps you outline the roadmap to success. Everyone must know exactly what they have ownership over and what the group is working toward. Without a shared North Star, it’s difficult to assess daily priorities. Especially in startups, every day can feel like everything’s on fire, and when there’s so much to do it’s tough to decide what to do first. Your job is to help teach your employees how to prioritize their most impactful task that day, so they can go from receiving priorities from you, to helping define them without hand holding.
Set clear boundaries, for you and them. Working remotely can blur the lines between work and personal life. Set clear boundaries between yourself and your team, but more importantly, empower your team to set them as well. This might involve establishing specific work hours or creating guidelines for communication outside of normal work hours.
I want my team to have access to me 24/7. Especially in case of an emergency, I always care about each team member enough to take a call. Conversely, I use the Slack “send later” function to schedule after-work messages in the morning so I’m not bothering them outside of work hours. They know they have the flexibility to take a long lunch to pick up a sick kid from school, or pop in at the last minute to bring in cupcakes. The key element, trust, is how I know they’ll come back online later that evening to finish up their work.
Provide real support. Good remote managers ensure that their team has the support and resources they need to do their job effectively. This might involve providing training, access to necessary tools and equipment, or simply being available to answer questions and provide guidance. Sometimes, it might feel like all you’re doing is resetting passwords and editing copy. But if that’s what your team needs to go live that day, that is what providing support looks like. Often, it looks like removing roadblocks, or just being available to listen.
Support also means checking in on their personal and professional long-term goals. How can you help them make sure they’re developing new skills and leveling up?
Remote managing is definitely different from coming into an office every day. But with the right tools and tech, and a commitment to the company values and communication, you’ll be sipping coffee from a “best remote boss in the world” mug soon.
