Today, I want to share with you my sixth work from home tip, and that's to have dedicated meeting time with your team, especially working from home.
It's incredibly hard to manage remote teams, especially as the first level manager, where you have five to 10 direct reports. So I recommend that you set up a time for one-on-ones with your team once a week. When I did this with my manager, it helped me to build my relationship with my manager when I was working in corporate America.
Secondly, you also want to set a code for cultural norms for remote work. Maggie Leung, who manages 80 remote content writers for NerdWallet, has a tremendous cultural North star. I like to share with you their first three bullets.
So you know people have your back when:
- You feel safe enough to let your weaknesses show, and you know the people won't judge you.
- You can ask for help without fear of judgment.
- Your teammates voluntarily help you with a sense of goodwill without expecting anything particular in return. They step up even when they have no obligation to do so.
So I think that's going to help write out Theia Marketing's team norms as well as we work from home.
Ultimately, it's about building relationships with your team. It goes beyond transactional relationships, this for that, and getting to know and appreciate the person on your team for who they are.
Some simple questions that you should know the answer to are:
- What are their kids' names?
- What do they do as a family in their free time?
- Or if you have a coworker on your team who is single, what does he or she like to do in their free time?
- How do they like to get things done?
- How often do they ask for feedback? Do they ask for feedback?
- How do you give feedback?
- Do they trust you as their manager to deliver hard feedback without ruining the relationship?
Those are just some tips on managing a team while working from home. It's challenging to do it, but I recommend having at least one one-on-one with each of your team members each week to make sure they stay on track, and you know what their concerns are and to keep fires from bursting into forest fires.
