Meetings When Working with Remote Workers

Technology has increased and made it possible for many companies to keep operating remotely. However, remote work isn’t always favorable to all the parties involved, especially team leaders and managers.

If you aren’t used to managing a team on a remote basis, you may be tempted to micro-manage your team. It would make more sense to frequently check in on your side and ask your team for status updates.

Meetings are the essential crux for all team leaders, managers, and upper management to sit down all their team members and communicate their points across effectively.

How do you Keep Track of Your Team Remotely?

A great way to track your team is through frequent check-ins, asking for updates, and holding meetings to foster a team environment.

The three major types of meetings that you should hold with remote workers are:

  • All administration and communication activities will interfere with employee productivity and lead to frustrations for your entire team. 
  • To make remote work, more efficient, less aggravating, you should limit your total number of meetings.

1: Initial meetings

Initial meetings are the types of gatherings where you go over all the different processes and procedures. It is crucial to communicate and work well together in teams to ensure that the work is completed successfully.

2: Regular meetings: Regular meetings are the most utilized and the most common types of meetings held by businesses, organizations, and corporations. Regular meetings are incredibly crucial for customer-facing teams, or through bi-weekly sessions and monthly meetings. 

When you regularly organize regular meetings, you are making yourself more capable of organizing your entire list of priorities.

3: One-on-one meetings

You can also create one-on-one meeting slots for all employees, and a lot more employees may want to touch their base with managers. 

All of your employees who don’t check-in will need to know whether you’re open or not to take the call for meetings.

What is the primary purpose behind holding these meetings?

Employees, who are not regularly used to remote work, may also struggle with managing schedules as leaders may also feel that they have no visibility for what’s going on. Let us take a more in-depth look into understanding the significant purposes behind holding these meetings:

  1. Setting Proper Expectations with Your Teams

There will be many employees who are not used to remote working and may also struggle with managing schedules. Leaders may have little visibility to know what’s going on, as many slight work problems are usually traced back to miscommunication and wrong assumptions.

It is essential to assume that people who answer messages immediately think that working from home is the same as working from the office.

Companies can avoid these kinds of assumptions, and all the related problems by creating working agreements. Everyone knows what to expect while doing remote work, and arrangements can be applied to both employees and leaders.

By following the list mentioned above of guidelines, you are making yourself more relevant to the specific mediums that you are targeting. It is essential to brainstorm an entire list of all the info that you need to share and agree with your team on what needs to be shared.

Defining the particulars of what needs to be sent out via email, what can’t be handled through a platform like instant messaging, response times, and communication tools are the best metrics to consider while evaluating the success of these tools.

 It is essential to encourage employees to save time for engaging in focused work and working according to instructions.

2. Meetings always keep things moving forward.

It is important to have meetings to keep things moving forward continually, and it may be frustrating for all your remote workers. 

As we live in a very technologically advanced and adept world, we are subjected to constant interruptions in the forms of meetings, calls, emails, and other communications.

People may find it incredibly difficult to find work from home due to the constant distractions of family and personal life obligations.

Scaling the number of meetings frees up all the people who aren’t involved in the sessions to plan and work on their schedules effectively. 

Having a pre-determined meeting schedule will give people more control of their calendars and work on their assigned tasks. People will respond more effectively to meetings that are organized.

Final Thoughts

Now you are aware of the different types of meetings, you will be adept at organizing the right kind of meetings for your employees. By following these practices, you will be adapting the best processes to ensure maximum success.