How Managers Can Support Remote Workers: 5 Actionable Tips

The world of work has changed dramatically over the past couple of years. More employees are either working remotely or moving towards hybrid working, with recent world events accelerating this trend.

So, in this new paradigm, how do managers get the best out of their teams? Rather than rely on old habits, good managers will find new ways of empowering their people, helping them to achieve at the highest level. In this article, we’ll look at five practical ways managers can give their remote workers the support they need to deliver value consistently.

1. Touch base frequently

Working remotely can get lonely, and great managers will mitigate this by being intentional with their communication. By making it a priority to touch base with team members frequently, your colleagues will know that they are valued, they have a voice and their thoughts are being heard. This can be done in a variety of ways, and it will depend on your company’s preferred method of communication, but we’ve gotten great results by erring on the side of more communication versus less.

2. Run video conferences in the background

Building on the point above, a semblance of the old office atmosphere can be recreated by running a video conference with your team as you work. This helps team members feel that they are working together towards a common goal and can prevent feelings of isolation while making collaboration faster and easier. Yay.com supports both audio and video conferences, so is the perfect collaboration platform for remote and hybrid teams. We’ve also got in-app video conferencing support coming soon which will make the whole process even easier, further boosting camaraderie and togetherness.

3. Share successes with the team

Another difficulty with remote teams is that employees might not be getting recognised in the same way they used to for the work they do. It can be demoralising to spend weeks on a project and then submit it with little to no feedback or acknowledgement of the effort it took. Good managers go to great lengths to share the successes of their team in an effort to reward members publicly for their great work. This helps to make rewards feel real for members of the team, building the sense that individuals are part of a larger purpose in the workplace.

4. Leverage your phone system

When you’re working remotely, it’s important that your key communication channels are working efficiently at all times. Any friction in the process can be frustrating for teams that are trying to collaborate efficiently. As such, it’s very important that your phone system is set up to route and direct calls effectively.

For example, when it comes to call queues, the idea is to work towards sharing the call workload fairly. Thoughtful organisations prioritise forwarded calls to ring through to staff starting with, for example, the agent who has answered the least calls, the one with the shortest talk time for the day, or who has been idle for the longest. These small details help to make sure that everyone is contributing equally, and no one feels unfairly burdened.

Yay.com's VoIP phone system allows smart businesses to automate this process.

If you're wondering what VoIP is, it's a technology for conducting voice calls over the internet (hence the name, Voice over Internet Protocol).  Cloud-hosted VoIP solutions offer many more features than traditional phone systems, often with more user-friendly implementations.  All it takes is the right setup to radically improve the efficiency of your work.

5. Target staff training to boost efficiency

Not only do great managers focus on the macro-setup when it comes to their phone system, but they also seek to help their team members use their phone system efficiently by digging into the details. By targeting training to each team member, you can help them to understand which aspects of your chosen VoIP service can aid the workflow the most. Features like internal, secure instant messaging and file-sharing make it easy to securely ping even sensitive documents around the office. Meanwhile, management can look into using call statistics to identify which agents are struggling, perhaps need additional training, or are just in need of a friendly catch up to boost morale.

These five actionable tips are a great starting point for managers who want the best for their team. As you can see, the world of remote work requires a different mindset and different habits to get the most out of your team. Hopefully, these actionable tips can serve as inspiration for some ways to implement remote work-specific strategies. Use this as a foundation and you’ll be off to the races!

Here at Yay.com, we’ve helped a huge number of businesses achieve maximum efficiency through the use of better business phone services, regardless of whether they’re in the office or working in a distributed fashion. If this is something you think we could help you with, get in touch and let’s see what we can do!