While hotel managers often focus more on the mechanics of their business, team performance is that very aspect driving everything and influencing the overall success. That’s why it’s essential to have the right team members aboard and invest in their regular training. It’s a key to your hotel employees’ work motivation, satisfaction, and productivity.
The same is true when it comes to working with remote teams.
And still, it remains a bit more difficult for managers to influence and control remote employees’ performance and work effectiveness. To maximize it and ensure they work with satisfaction and pleasure, you need to consider and provide your team with the following factors.
1. Clear goals and KPI
It’s challenging for remote employees to flow into your working processes because they aren’t physically present at meetings. Plus, they have no chance to communicate with colleagues in person anytime they have a question or aren’t sure about an assigned task.
To prevent misunderstandings and conflicts, do your best to clarify your business vision and goals to them. Be clear and specify each team member’s responsibilities. Milestones (KPIs) are also necessary for remote specialists to better understand the work process and organize their time accordingly.
As a rule, most teams work effectively with both goals and KPIs at hand. But it’s worth mentioning that goal-setting is more appropriate to consider when your squad is project-based, while KPIs are a subject of a process-based working environment.
2. Transparency
When your team works remotely, there’s a high risk to leave each member to themselves:
Once they understand business goals and their individual tasks and KPIs, they may “forget” about the team and focus only on personal performance without even knowing what other colleagues do.
As far as you understand, it’s not how high team performance and effectiveness appear.
As a manager, you need to encourage transparency in the team, motivating them to communicate what they do and intend to achieve. But ensure your team understands that it’s not for the strict control of their every step but a better understanding of others’ roles in the group and where the project goes.
The best way to achieve transparency is to organize a common platform where members communicate their actions towards the project. It can be a group chat in messengers or any team task management tool (Trello, Asana, ClickUp, you name it).
Such transparency can impact your team performance significantly:
- Everyone will better understand and appreciate what others do.
- Team members will have an opportunity to collaborate and assist each other, writing argumentative notes whenever appropriate.
- It’s a chance for employees to think about their priorities, not just complete tasks on auto-pilot.
- Updating the team on their progress, employees will see it more straightforward, feeling the satisfaction from their work.
- It will help them organize working days and you — to see what everyone is working on at the moment, managing the whole process more effectively.
3. Regular meetings
Not only are they critical for organizing and managing work processes, but they are also a must for exchanging feedback and strengthening the relationship with employees.
When your team members work remotely, it can be challenging to catch their attention: They get tons of information via different communication channels, feel stressed, and thus miss or ignore messages from you. That’s what you can do to deal with that:
- Determine their most preferable communication channel: Some choose business email, while others prefer messengers or phone/video calls. It will help you reach them faster.
- Share only the necessary information with them, the one relating to them directly. Thus employees will know that if you contact them, it means something important and requesting a reply.
Besides group meetings, make it a habit to practice one-on-one messaging with remote team members to discuss their individual goals and accomplishments. Ask them to share their feedback on the tasks you assign and their role for the overall project. Thus you’ll motivate your remote workers to be more proactive.
4. Perks
Employee perks are essential to show your team that you value them and care about their wellbeing. They are great to reward a person for hard work, accomplishment, or a business idea, and it’s a pleasant bonus way to show your employees that their work doesn’t go unseen.
Perks bring a positive atmosphere to the team, creating a sense of camaraderie, influencing employee retention and loyalty, and increasing productivity and overall performance. They help create an engaged workforce, promoting collaboration for better team effectiveness.
And, sure thing, all these benefits work for remote employees too.
Here go some perks you can offer to promote engagement in your remote team:
- Flexible working hours for a better work-life balance of your employees
- Discounted dining memberships, gyms, or hotel booking
- Paying for additional training or online courses on professional development
- Sending tiny and cute surprises like a Starbucks coffee certificate, a T-shirt, or any other gift, and so on.
5. Positive team culture
While some managers still insist that team culture is optional and unrelated to work performance, highly effective teams are almost always those with a strong and positive culture. When employees respect, understand, and like each other, they are naturally more motivated to work together, help each other, and perform better for shared project success.
Different team-building activities are a great instrument for promoting positive team culture within your team. They help people know each other, bond over interests and experiences, and learn to trust each other.
In the case of remote teams, when not all your employees work in the same office, you need to connect them with their non-remote colleagues. When feeling connected with the rest of the organization, remote specialists become more engaged and productive, participating in business processes actively.
Virtual communication can become the best option to connect your remote team with non-remote employees:
With the help of corresponding communication software, you can create a virtual booth for all employees to get together, share news and insights, have some fun via small talks or sharing funny memes, and so on.
About the author
Lesley Vos is a seasoned copywriter and digital marketer, freelancing as a guest blogger and writing on education, career, business, and self-growth. Feel free to see more works of hers on Twitter @LesleyVos or read her profile at the Bid4Papers blog.
