#clearexpectations

Are you a visionary, a coach, or a team player? Take our interactive quiz to uncover your unique approach to leadership. Through five insightful questions, find out how you naturally lead and how to leverage your strengths.

Discover Your Leadership Style!

Introduction

In the last few years, remote work has become increasingly popular as companies realize the cost savings and improved efficiency that comes with it. But managing a remote team can be a challenge. Without the ability to physically be together, it can be difficult to maintain team cohesion and ensure that everyone is productive. Luckily, there are a few tips and tricks that can help you manage a remote team more effectively. In this post, we’ll take a look at five tips for managing a remote team.

Tip #1: Provide Clear Expectations

The first tip for managing a remote team is to provide clear expectations. Without being able to physically observe team members, it’s important to make sure that expectations are clearly communicated. This includes setting expectations for communication, deadlines, and deliverables. Make sure that everyone is on the same page and that expectations are realistic.

Tip #2: Utilize the Right Tools

The second tip for managing a remote team is to utilize the right tools. With so many communication and collaboration tools available, it’s important to choose the right ones for your team. This can include tools such as Slack, Zoom, and Trello. These tools can help keep team members connected and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Tip #3: Create a Team Culture

The third tip for managing a remote team is to create a team culture. Without the ability to physically be together, it can be difficult to create a sense of camaraderie. But with the right tools, it’s possible to create a team culture online. This can include things such as team-building activities, virtual happy hours, and even virtual team retreats.

Tip #4: Create Incentives

The fourth tip for managing a remote team is to create incentives. When team members are working from home, it can be difficult to stay motivated and productive. To help keep team members engaged, it’s important to create incentives such as bonuses or rewards for good performance. This can help to keep everyone motivated and ensure that they are meeting their goals.

Tip #5: Track Performance

The fifth tip for managing a remote team is to track performance. Without the ability to physically observe team members, it’s important to track performance to ensure that everyone is meeting their goals. This can include tracking things such as deliverables, deadlines, and communication. This will help to ensure that everyone is on track and that team members are held accountable for their work.

Conclusion

When I hear the word expectation, it elicits a certain visceral feeling in my stomach and my mind drifts to clichés about expectations. “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed,” Alexander Pope. I think this is a dangerous notion to push on parents. If I could pick one piece of advice to offer to new parents, it would be to establish clear expectations for the standard of care for your child and to not be afraid to make them known.

Setting expectations does a couple different and productive things for parents. The most important, in my eyes, is it allows parents the peace of mind associated with knowing the standard of care their child will receive in their absence. This should not be under appreciated. Even something as simple as, “when my child spills water all over their clothes, please change them into their spare clothes,” sets a standard that can be depended on. There is something so reassuring about trusting the environment you leave your child in and knowing that when you return, you should not be caught off guard.

Setting and explaining clear expectations is necessary in many common sense child situations such as from interactions with your in-laws, the babysitter, and other care takers. However, it is important to consider discussing expectations in a perhaps less intuitive situation like with your spouse.  As a mostly stay at home mom with a husband who travels out of town for extended periods of time, my daughter and I have fallen into a set of routines that we follow pretty strictly. We have clear set boundaries and expectations for what our life is like. When my husband returns home, it is easy for these well established, and if I may say, successful, routines to be disrupted. But all kidding aside, as important as it is to set expectations with outside influences on your child, it is equally as important to come to a spoken consensus as parents. A good general rule is to leave any notion of assumption out of expectations because, as the saying goes, “when you assume, you make an … out of you and me.”