Remote working has revolutionized work culture and practices across all industries. With companies of all kinds embracing remote or hybrid working and seeing amazing results, it’s a win-win situation for both employees and employers. With all the perks, though, come some notable challenges that businesses must recognize and address.
Project management is a prime example of something that’s tough to handle remotely, reliant as it is upon close-knit collaboration. But challenges are there to be overcome, and a smart combination of good planning, strong communication, and handy apps for remote working can deliver projects on time even when teammates are at different ends of the globe.
In this post, we’ll look at how you can improve your team project management when the team in question is working remotely, setting out a few key tips. Let’s get to them.
Set clear and transparent objectives
Clear communication is one of the most important aspects of project management. This is important not just for multicultural teams, but for any kind of remote team structure.
To improve the smoothness of your projects, always set transparent objectives so everyone is clear about their role and responsibilities – this might include deliverables, assets, or updates.
It can often feel impossible to know where to start with a project. By discussing tasks and realistic deadlines at the very beginning, you can make it significantly easier for people to achieve their goals without wasting time or needing to request managerial assistance. Having a set workload will also serve to keep burnout at bay.
One comprehensive online meeting each week will allow your team to catch up and share notes on progress without overly disrupting the flow. By the end of that meeting, everyone should know exactly what they’re aiming to achieve and have the guidance and resources to get started, finish the work, and log its completion without any confusion.
Effective diary management is vital in a remote work landscape to ensure efficient scheduling and coordination among team members.
Invest in high-performance infrastructure
It isn’t always HR issues that get in the way of team progress. We may be using technological marvels on a daily basis, but the sheer breadth of available systems and services can cause selection problems — particularly since they won’t always cooperate very effectively. Taking the time to sort out infrastructure is essential.
When you do this, though, you need to ensure that the related IT tasks don’t fall upon your regular team members. IT literacy may be at an all-time high, but this doesn’t mean you can realistically expect the average professional to be capable of keeping a website online. The more you burden them with such tasks, the more discontentment you’ll breed.
At every turn, then, outsource the admin. Instead of keeping things in-house to cut costs, value your employees for their core skills. There are various managed services geared towards agencies, from HR portals like BambooHR to file-sharing platforms like Dropbox, and they can take all the work out of getting things up and running. Your project time can thus go towards primary tasks instead of figuring out where key files have gone.
(Remember, though, to do your research before you commit to a particular service. They’re often costly with substantial learning curves, and putting time into something that doesn’t really suit your needs is a huge waste. Look for comparison pieces — BambooHR vs the myriad alternatives, Dropbox vs Google Drive, etc. — and make a smart call.)
Adopt a flatter (though not flat) structure
Much has been made in recent years of the concept of flat hierarchical structure in organizations. In other words, people have talked up the value of narrowing the authority gap between a manager and a typical worker — or even doing away with the manager altogether. The thought is that it’ll prevent excess red tape, improve communication with employees, and encourage collaboration.
Now, some have contended that everyone within an organization should have the same power, with no one having individual authority over another. This is a terrible idea. But the idea that preceded that contention is a strong one. If you want people to work together effectively, you need them to feel that they’re at least somewhat similarly capable.
In the remote era, it’s particularly important to even things out, as any two workers can easily have radically different experiences. So how can you do this? Here are some good options:
- Turn freelancers into full-time workers. It’s common for businesses today to hire freelancers for smaller projects only to end up using them time and time again, even coming to rely on them. Now, while you can compensate them well and even pay to be their priority client, freelancers will inevitably struggle to collaborate optimally on remote projects due to their perceived outsider status.
So if you’re in the position of relying on freelancers, consider pitching them to join you full-time. This is often avoided due to the inconvenience of hiring overseas, but the existence of employer-of-record services such as Remote largely defuse this challenge. Through such a service, you can easily hire an overseas employee and give them precisely the same range of HR services as any other employee.
- Give everyone a home-working budget. Even now that so much time has passed since the first pandemic-induced lockdown, there are plenty of people with home office setups that are lacking, to say the least. When one worker has a high-end chair courtesy of the company and another doesn’t, it can lead to resentment.
By allocating everyone a generous budget, you can ensure that everyone has the equipment they need to work effectively and comfortably. This will reduce the perceived gap between the haves and the have-nots, helping everyone feel prized.
- Encourage delegation and autonomy. Project managers don’t have to step in on everything. In fact, it’s vital that they don’t. The more they weigh in, the more their team members will get used to being passive. They need to learn what their team members are capable of and place their trust in them.
Autonomy will terrify some at first, but once they get accustomed to managing their own workloads, they’ll come to appreciate it — and knowing how things seem from a managerial perspective will leave them less inclined to grumble about the need for basic administration.
Roll out standard task-management tools
Even the smallest project will ultimately need to be broken down into various stages, and how you handle progression through those stages will determine the pace at which you get things done. To handle them well, you need to keep track of all the details big and small — so how do you do this without soaking up a prohibitive amount of time?
In an office environment, you can get quick but impactful updates from your team members, and that isn’t so simple at a distance (particularly if you’re not working in the same time zone). Complicating matters, nearly 60% of project managers are running between two and five projects each. Tough in person, but so much tougher apart.
Without any assistance, management on that level can become impossible to manage, leading to a drop in the quality of work. That’s where task-management tools enter the picture. Investing in services like Asana can ensure that all tasks are properly logged and allocated, taking the stress out of management and improving collaboration.
Remote project management doesn’t need to be a miserable experience if you put the right measures in place. If you can fully invest in collaborative tools and create effective workflows, you’ll soon see results across all your remote projects.
