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Team management is a vital skill for any business leader. It helps you organize people around a common goal, deliver on your promise to clients, and keep a high level of staff morale. All these are contributors to proper business functioning and growth. Otherwise, you may suffer from high turnover, absence of staff morale, team conflict, and the like.
Here we examine the golden rules of remote design team management. They will bring you one step closer to your dream team, helping you achieve outstanding business outcomes hassle-free.
People-Focused Approach
At the core of any team management process lies the idea that teams consist of people with personal motivations, interests, and concerns. Thus, treating all people in a company only as employees performing their jobs is ineffective. You need to understand your staff better, learn about their personal situation, and develop an individual approach to each of them.
This way, the staff in your team will see that their leader cares about their welfare. They will feel valued and understood, knowing that they are not simple tools for achieving your business goals. As a result, you will achieve a greater bond with staff and higher employee loyalty to your company.
Objectivity and Transparency
An ability to establish a spirit of transparency in your team is a top-level of professionalism. People working with you should feel that everyone is recognized and acknowledged in line with their contribution. At the same time, everyone works in line with one set of rules. Staff should know what they will get praise or reprimand for. The praise and punishment should come as expected.
However, it’s better to reprimand employees in private to avoid public humiliation. Public penalties don’t do any good to your staff’s morale and can ruin the employees’ trust in their leader. Thus, it may work to discuss the issues at a personal meeting, while recognizing the outstanding performance in public.
An important contributor to objectivity in the team is a clear sense of rewards and their transparent link to performance metrics. This will help avoid favoritism in the team, with some employees being treated better than others.
Effective Teambuilding
It’s wrong to think that once you put a group of people in one room and assign a common task, they will become a team. Unfortunately, group dynamics are much more complicated and nuanced. So, you need to help your staff become a real team by using the teambuilding and bonding tools, at least at the beginning of their collaboration. Teambuilding may also work out better when you see a group conflict in the team and need to address it effectively.
The primary goal of teambuilding activities is to increase trust among team members. People tend to trust each other more when they get acquainted better. To achieve this, you can take your team to outdoor activity or organized a structured training session. You can also apply the following techniques in the workplace:
- Ice breaker activities.
- Open conversations to get to know each other better (e.g., Two Truths and a Lie, Life Highlights).
- Trust-building activities (e.g., Code of Conduct).
- Team bonding with shared memories (e.g., Memory Wall).
- Communication enhancement methods (low-tech networking, such as a whiteboard).
If you have time and resources to go outdoors with your team, you may find it much more productive to use campfire stories or a common challenge. Spending some time together in the open nature is the best medicine for group conflict and a lack of mutual understanding.
Participatory Management
One of the best ways to establish meaningful relationships with the team is to show that they are listened to. People often come to managers with suggestions and initiatives, and your task is to treat all that input with respect and attention. You’ll be thrilled to know how much you can learn from other people’s perspectives. Some of these insights may even become your product’s saviors.
To make this happen, you should be easily reachable to the team members. A leader who surfaces only when they need something, unreachable during other working hours, has low chances for success. Besides, the absence of proper communication between the team and its leader is disastrous for the project’s outcomes. People may get confused about some tasks, unable to proceed until their get the leader’s clarifications.
Structure
Another point to consider when establishing a dream team is to give a bit of structure to your teamwork. People like structure because it explains what is expected from them and when, what they should do, and what actions are punishable and non-acceptable in the company. Once they get those borders established, they can enjoy much greater freedom and self-control in working on the task within the set space.
The best way to set the structure and monitor compliance with it is to hold regular staff meetings and make the company’s rules available to the staff. This arrangement will keep all employees in the loop, explaining the company’s requirements and helping you monitor compliance effectively.
Personalized Performance Measurement
What makes people work better and strive for improvements? In most cases, it is the recognition of their outstanding performance and their contribution to the team’s progression. If you make the system of rewards and performance evaluation transparent, it won’t look like favoritism.
Every staff member will know what they need to do to stay in the company, what is required to get a reward, and what is expected from people seeking a promotion. This way, the performance-based appraisal will work effectively, keeping people motivated to do more than the bare minimum.
Dream Teams Deliver Stellar Results
Using the tips we outlined above is a sure path to your business success. It’s much easier to work with people who like their leader, share their company’s values, and know their performance-related prospects. As a result of effective team management, you will get outstanding project results, quicker deliveries, and a favorable working climate. These outcomes are really worth striving for, as people like to work in warm, welcoming environments and goal-driven teams.