After the Covid19 pandemic, remote work became normal and popular too. A group of professionals of various skills, different time zones, and different cultures working together as a team for a particular project is now driving top tech teams over the world.
Working as a member of a remote team is one thing and managing the remote team is a different thing. Every teammate is present in different locations and cities, and working from their places has its both pros and cons. Managing a team in an office space is easy as compared to managing a remote team which is a challenging task. The challenges which you have to face are like project management, keep the tasks on time, and managing teams.
Process management to the rescue
Process management is referred to as how the company creates the new process, edits it, and analyzes it for making the core of its business. It ensures every department handles different works but follow certain processes for each type of work. It helps a newcomer to regular employees maintain proper workflows.
To ensure the business processes work in the desired direction having a proper process management and monitoring system became a need. The road to process management is using proper tools, doing proper communication and helping teammates to execute and track their works properly.
Important business process areas you have to keep an eye on
- Remote working tools: - The manager should rely on the right remote working tools so all the team members should be connected in one place. In today's world technology has become so advanced that there are various remote work tools that a manager can use to handle the work, process management tools like GoodFlow, project management tool like JIRA, Communication tools like Microsoft teams, etc., of your team members.
- Collaborating on projects: - There should be proper collaboration as it is important for the success of the business. While with remote teams it is difficult to maintain coordination which will lead to poorly organized projects and not reach their goals. It is very difficult for a manager to keep all the members of the remote team on the same page. The solution to this issue is using a proper process management tool that will allow you to have a birds-eye view of all the running works across your team/organization.
- Cultural differences: - As we have discussed earlier remote team consists of members from different cultures. This might lead to a problem for the manager to communicate and coordinate with members of different cultures. The people of various cultures have their working ethics and a particular mindset towards a career. You can solve it by focusing on building a culture in your organization, where people from different background will bring their unique voice, expertise and angle.
- Different time zones: - The main and big problem is the time zone. People with different locations and cities have different time zones. As the manager has to manage a remote team on a global level so for him it is difficult to manage meetings as every person's time zone is different from another one. To reduce impact of this issue, try to create as much overlap as possible between the teams, so that they can communicate for a significant time with each other. If required, choose the teammates accordingly.
As the manager, you have to properly make a schedule for managing a remote team. For achieving the goals and objectives of the companies you have to do some planning of each workflow, think what you need to introduce in your process management workflows to make it more efficient for the remote teams and you will start seeing improvement.