With the expansion of teleworking and remote workplaces, teams are finding themselves spread across many different geographic locations. This requires rethinking how to manage remotely.
Digital workspaces are making it possible to continue working as a team even when remote. To do this successfully, team members are coordinating and creating recurring virtual meetings.
Wondering how to manage your team remotely? Here are nine activities you can easily use in Beekast!
1. Start the day with a Daily Meeting
Begin the day by getting the team together at a Daily Meeting. Ask each person to indicate their tasks for the day in their column. This is also an opportunity to share sticking points and ask questions about how the team is working and what progress is being made on ongoing projects. This daily check-in is essential to keep teams connected.
Your Daily Meeting with Beekast:
Create a Board activity
Create a column for each participant and a column for sticking points and for questions
Share the session with your team and ask each person to fill in the appropriate columns
Then, facilitate the Daily Meeting by asking each one to take a turn presenting their cards verbally
2. Show your work environment to create connection
To help people forget distances and preserve social connections among team members, invite everyone to share a photo of the place where they’re teleworking. This participatory activity is an icebreaker that helps the team feel more connected and less isolated.
Create connections with Beekast’s Selfie Wall:
Create a Selfie Wall activity
Share the session with your team and ask each one to upload a photo of the place where they’re teleworking
3. Gauge your team’s mood
What frame of mind are your employees in today? It’s not easy to figure out when you’re remote. An icebreaker activity will help you easily get the entire time to participate and home in on the general mood. It’s a starting point for discussions with the team.
Get a Weather Report with Beekast:
Create a Word Cloud activity
Ask your team to share how they’re feeling using an emoji
At the end of the activity, you’ll see the general trend
Ask your team to explain their frame of mind verbally
4. Manage priorities as a team
Set team objectives based on current importance and urgency. The Eisenhower Matrix helps you agree on priorities to improve productivity and save time together.
Manage priorities with Beekast:
Create a Matrix activity
Add suggestions to be evaluated based on the urgency and level of importance
Ask your team to rank the suggestions together on the matrix
Then, create an action plan
5. Organise a retrospective to review progress
Review the most recent projects with your team remotely by organising an agile speedboat activity. The goal? To update work processes regularly so you can always keep improving.
With Beekast’s Metaphor activity, you can get your team together virtually for a speedboat workshop, review the drivers (strengths) and anchors (constraints) on current projects, and accomplish the expected results together.
Host a retrospective with Beekast:
Create a Metaphor activity
Ask each participant to add ideas to the Strengths and Constraints categories
Allow them to explain their ideas verbally
Then, launch a Vote to highlight the biggest constraints
The facilitator records the main anchors and adds them to a Board
Each person suggests improvement strategies on this Board
A Vote allows everyone to choose the best ideas for improvement
6. Survey employees to gather their opinions
Want to consider the opinions of your employees before taking a decision? Set up a survey to gather opinions remotely so that the entire team can participate, even the most timid. The survey can be set up in anonymous mode. If the results lead to a decision, remember to record it in the instant messaging thread using the Actions/Decisions feature.
7. Meet with everyone individually
Nurture connection and maintain strong relationships with each of your employees, even while you’re remote. Spending this time with your teams is essential to enable individual discussions and help the employee feel less isolated.
Meet one-to-one with Beekast:
Create an individual Beekast session for each employee
Create a Board activity with four columns: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed
The employee fills out the columns ahead of time, then explains their cards during the individual meeting
The manager uses the same Beekast session each time and creates a new Board each month, which allows them to track the one-to-ones
8. Gather feedback after each meeting
Setting up a ROTI review to get feedback from the team on the meeting you’ve just finished is always important, but even more so when the team is working remotely. The goal? To optimise future meetings so that they’re more efficient and satisfy all team members.
Get quality feedback on each meeting:
Create a Form activity
Configure the activity as a Rating and open-ended question
Launch the activity and let participants evaluate the ROTI and add their qualitative feedback
9. Keep a record of each discussion
To remove any doubt on decisions taken during a meeting and on the action plan, send the meeting notes to all participants. This written record is essential for tracking, especially when the team is remote.
Create automatic meeting notes with Beekast
At the end of the meeting, click on Download the report in Word format, which will include all the session’s information
Send the report to participants
In summary, go for simple processes that allow you to get the team together quickly through phone conferences, video conferences or other communication tools.
Finally, remember this key fact: trusting your teams is the basis for good collaboration, both when you’re physically present and when you’re remote.
Teleworking is now part of our everyday lives and it’s up to each of us to adapt to make it more enjoyable, effective and compelling.
