Managing virtual teams brings extra challenges — but also rewards. You get the privilege of working with people from diverse backgrounds and making hires based on talent rather than geography. But how to lead a remote team effectively?

As with any team, managing people remotely means building trust and coaching them to success. Keeping virtual teams productive and engaged might take some extra effort, but it’s entirely doable.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to overcome the challenges of leading a team in a remote work environment. I’ll share tips that we and our clients use with our own remote teams. Whether you’re new to managing a virtual team or just want a few pointers, these leadership strategies will help you get more from your people.

Build a strong culture.

Leading a remote workforce starts with fostering a great workplace culture. Take these three steps, and you’ll be on your way to growing a vibrant culture where people truly enjoy working.

• Refer to your core values often when talking with your team. Integrate them into the conversation, reminding people of why you’re pursuing a goal or how your daily work improves clients’ lives. “Teams thrive when they know what their company stands for, and they feel a stronger connection when those values resonate with their own personal beliefs,” says Maddox P. Sterling in Lead from Anywhere. This is good advice that every leader should remember.
• Recognize milestones you achieve as a group and individually. Only 24% of employees feel acknowledged for their efforts. Celebrating your smaller wins will keep people motivated to work toward the bigger, more challenging ones. It will also boost their confidence, highlighting the progress they’ve made.
• Hold occasional social events, like a virtual coffee hour for catching up. Making time to get to know each other will help you all build a rapport together.

Also strive to evaluate and reward all employees fairly. If you have a hybrid team that includes in-person and remote workers, make sure you’re not privileging those who work in office. That’s called proximity bias. According to research by the Society for Human Resource Management, 67% of managers of hybrid teams view remote workers as more replaceable than in-person ones. And 42% of virtual employees say their managers often forget about them while assigning tasks, while 29% say they lack development opportunities. Make sure you’re treating all your employees as equals, which is crucial for a thriving culture.

Establish clear protocols and expectations.

Just 46% of employees know what their managers expect of them, Gallup has found. When managing a virtual team, it’s better to overcommunicate about processes and expectations. Designing clear protocols like these will help work flow smoothly.

Set norms for sharing team updates.

Create norms around when to share project and task updates. If you expect weekly updates during team meetings, make that clear.

Hold regular sync meetings.

Schedule weekly sync meetings with your executive assistant (EA), if you have one. Use a sync meeting template for organizing your thoughts, so you don’t have to create a brand-new agenda every week. Your EA can then help keep you and the team on track.

By hiring people who are well-versed in how to handle key tasks, you’ll also help ensure expectations are clear. They’ll already have a good idea of what you and your clients expect.

Highlight action items.

After a meeting, your executive assistant can send out a report showing action items. Be sure to note who will carry each of them out, and by what date.

By clarifying expectations, you’ll avoid a lot of frustration and help your team work more efficiently toward their goals.

Establish lines of communication.

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Putting thought into your communication norms is vital on a virtual team. Define how communication should flow, through these practices and tools.

• Create lines of communication for who reports to whom. Craft a communication chart with pictures and job titles. When you integrate a new person onto the team, this visual reference will help them quickly get up to speed.
• Hold regular team check-ins, adopting standard practices like brief report-backs.
• Use platforms that facilitate collaboration on a virtual team. Choose tools that enable asynchronous communication and cooperation, keeping messages and information well organized.
• Utilize good tracking systems so you can easily see the status of projects or initiatives and share updates about them.

Clear communication will help you stay on track toward your goals. It will also help you avoid misunderstandings and form strong relationships.

Define “done.”

In assigning a task, leaders often focus on when it needs to be done. Meanwhile, they don’t define what “done” means. Employees might then complete it unsatisfactorily or become too perfectionist, worried that their work won’t be good enough.

So, explain what you expect the work to look like in its final form (“When you get to that point, that means it’s done”). Here are a few examples:

• When my assistant Xie produces our social media videos, she knows they’re done once she has edited them to the correct length and inserted close captions into the frames. 
• For renewals, “done” means you’ve reviewed all the options, highlighted the best one, and presented them to the account manager in the desired format, like an Excel spreadsheet.
• For email management, it means your executive assistant has reviewed your entire inbox by a certain time of day, updating your agenda with anything urgent. 
• For customer service tasks, it means handling client requests and saving a description of how they were resolved in a particular file folder that you can review later.

Clarifying what the finished product should look like will help employees confidently wrap up tasks in a timely manner.

Focus on outcomes.

Some companies have gone to great lengths to track how virtual employees spend their time. But looking at how they’re spending every minute of the day is a surefire way to undermine trust and build resentment. Instead, focus on outcomes in these ways:

• Check in with them about their core priorities regularly.
• Assess their progress toward goals, looking at benchmarks they’re reached.
• Talk with them about time management or other strategies for working smarter, if needed.

It doesn’t matter if they go on social media now and then, as long as the work is getting done. Rather than micromanaging, make sure everyone feels genuinely invested in outcomes. This is a cornerstone of keeping virtual teams engaged. Talk about your shared goals in virtual meetings, emphasizing each person’s role in achieving them. When they feel like part of something bigger than themselves, they’ll feel more driven to achieve their goals.

As you grow your skills in leading a remote workforce, you’ll eliminate bottlenecks and see your team accomplishing more together. Despite the challenges of leading a team in a remote work environment, you’ll ensure that communication and work flows smoothly. You’ll also prepare people to take on more responsibility as you scale. All of this will help you foster a strong remote team culture as well.

To learn more about how the right virtual assistant can enhance your remote team, set up a discovery call. We’ll discuss the challenges your business is facing and whether hiring a VA can help you address them. I’ll be glad to share examples of how a VA or an executive assistant has benefited many of our clients, giving them back countless hours each week for high-value activities. And if you decide to hire a VA, I’ll also share tips for managing remote teams and virtual employees that work for our clients. As you learn how to lead a remote team with skill, you’ll help each person tap into their greatest strengths.