At a time when many companies are asking their staff to work from home, managers and small business owners are suddenly finding themselves in a position where they have a large group of remote workers to manage.

If your managers are now managing a remote team, it is vital that they maintain the visibility into what’s happening within their team, now that the team are not all in the office together. It’s easy for your remote staff to lose their focus and to feel more isolated from their manager and their colleagues. Over time, this can lead to a less engaged and a less productive remote workforce. Furthermore, your managers may not be experienced enough to manage so many remote employees concurrently. They will need help.

An effective way of helping them is to introduce a weekly check-in that all remote staff can participate in. Think of it as a remote one-on-one between a manager and each of their employees.  By prompting your remote staff to answer a few simple questions about their work on a weekly basis, a valuable coaching conversation will start between a remote worker and their manager.

Simple questions like “What big things did you achieve this week?” and “What obstacles did you encounter and how do you plan to overcome them?” are great questions to start a conversation and get valuable information flowing.

Each manager will then have a much clearer idea of the obstacles that their remote team are facing and they will have a platform to start coaching their employees, helping their remote staff feel less isolated and more engaged.

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There are a few tools that provide this sort of functionality. Workteam is one of them. With Workteam, your staff will be prompted at the end of each week to answer a set of questions about their work, which are designed to start that coaching conversation. The questions are fully customizable at an organization level and at a managerial level.

The idea is that each remote employee spends just a few minutes answering the questions each week and submits their answers at the end of the week. Each manager then gets to review their employees’ submissions and this is when they can start commenting on each answer and mentioning other people in the organization to bring them into the discussion around a particular topic or issue.

Using employee check-in software for conducting remote 1 on 1s is an essential tool that you should include in your company’s set of remote work engagement tools.

It has the following benefits:

  • It provides managers with better visibility into their remote teams.
  • It keeps your remote staff more engaged, more productive and less likely to drift.
  • It starts a valuable coaching conversation each week between an employee and their manager.
  • It enables collaborative discussions around specific outcomes across your remote teams.

For more information about Workteam Check-ins and to sign up for a free 14-day trial, go to Workteam Check-ins.