Managing Remote Teams
When a team is working remotely, you lose the ability to observe your team directly.
One of the keys that we found to managing this is to focus on productivity, setting goals that are as specific as possible about what needs to be achieved.
Hi, I'm Burton. I'm the founder and CEO of Sutro Li - we provide accounting for great causes.
How do you manage productivity when your team is working remotely? When a team is working remotely, you lose the daily interaction and the ability to observe how your team is doing. We also lose a great deal of control over how people spend their time. One of the keys that we found to managing a team that's working remotely is to focus on productivity, not time to do this.
You need to set goals that are as specific as possible about what needs to be achieved and how much time the team has to achieve that goal. Then we use these goals as the subject matter for our check ins and for our management, this can eliminate the vague check in meeting that some version of ‘how do you feel like things are going?’
If we can measure output objectively, then we don't have to rely on measuring time and chasing people for when they're at their desk or when they're not at their desk. Get everyone focused on productivity and you can stop managing people's time.
One framework that we find works really Well, for this type of goal setting is the objectives and key results, or OKR framework. And I'll be talking more about this next week if you'd like to hear more, give us a follow and we'll see you next week.