How to Maintain the Culture in Remote Teams

Having a healthy and productive work environment is extremely important in every company. It's hard enough in traditional office teams, but imagine how hard it is with remote ones. People that work in such a way aren’t even close and they communicate only via chat or Skype. So, it's even harder for you to manage them. In order to get this settled, in this article we will talk about different ways how you can maintain culture in remote teams.

Rules

We all know that people function much better when they work under some rules. Heck, that's how the whole law system works. So, if you want your employees to behave as one big family, you'll need to set some rules. And I don't mean something very strict. These rules only need to put all employees on the same level and let them know they’re all equal. If they already worked in a collective, they must know that it consists of different individuals and that there are some universal rules which apply to all teams.

Also, as soon as you incorporate these ground rules, you’ll see how people will react and behave. From that, you’ll have a bunch of information. You wouldn’t want a person who does everything on their own (in a bad way) right? Think of this as a cornerstone of you business and the whole collective of your remote workers. 

Teambuilding

Even though remote teams aren’t near, they can still have some fun. It’s been proven that friendship and a bit of relaxation works as a productivity booster for many teams. Therefore, there are a lot of online team building games available on the net. 

Set aside, let’s say, every Friday for such activity. The weekend is near and people often get distracted. Don't be strict, but go with the flow and let them relax a little. Whether it's some kind of contest among them, simple virtual games or any type of quiz, all of it offers a great way for your employees to strengthen their connection and friendship.

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Create an Open Environment

This one is very important. We’ve all been in situations where you just started working in a new place, you don’t have any friends and the task you got isn’t very familiar to you. And you may be scared. You don’t know what to do, your boss doesn’t like unnecessary questions and none of  your colleagues seem keen to help you. In a word, you might be feeling lonely. 

This is awful and you ought to cut this issue at the root. Nurture an open environment. Create a setting where your employees won’t be scared to ask any questions. Make them believe that they’ll always have a friend and someone to ask for a favor or help. By doing this, they’ll be happy, their connections will get stronger and best of all - they’ll love their working environment.

Make Them All Equal 

As mentioned before, having all of your remote employees on the same page is very important. They should know that they’re all on the same level, contributing to the same goal. It’s been proven that many problems in virtual teams occur because the team members don’t trust each other, they believe some of them don’t contribute equally to the business or that someone is paid more/less than they should be.

A perfect solution for this are remote team management tools. Such as monitoring and time tracking tools, which offer great benefits to you and your employees. First of all, everything is transparent. You’ll have an insight in how much is every individual working, which sites they visit and how they spend their time. Also, most of these platforms have billing aspect integrated. You can easily see how much do you pay your workers and whether they’re being overpaid or underpaid based on their work.

Remote monitoring software for windows is great because it can eliminate any doubts that your employees might have. At any given time, you’ll know statistically how much time they work or not and later on can adjust it towards a more healthy environment. 

Computer software to monitor activity will serve as security for all your employees and hopefully turn untrustworthy ones into trustworthy.

Conclusion

Remote teams are very tricky to handle, but if you pull out to manage them properly, remote teams can be even more productive than traditional ones. And, if you have any doubts about your employees Google how to spy on employees computers and just relax.

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