We do not usually expect that distance will significantly affect our work relationships, but 2020 made many of us reconsider this misconception. However, despite its challenges, working from the office is getting increasingly less popular.
Today, businesses are increasingly accepting this trend, realizing that they can hire the best specialists from different countries. It’s no secret that remote employees are profitable for business as they allow for both a reduction in office maintenance costs and an opportunity of choosing the best employees.
But with this comes a new responsibility of managing remote teams. As a remote leader, your job is managing, guiding, supporting the team members, which is extra challenging when they don’t inhibit the same office space. This is particularly true for work that requires constant cooperation, depending on good team relations, such as UX writing.
A good user experience should be a priority for all online businesses, but unfortunately, it’s not the case. 2020 statistics show that over half of companies ignore their resource’s user-friendliness and don’t occupy themselves with clear optimized texts for their websites. Crazy, right?
Unfortunately, for effective UX writing team management, classical managerial skills may not be enough.
So, how does one ensure effective remote teamwork? Read on to find out!
Ways to Keep Your Remote UX Writing Team in Check
1. Build Trust
A leader needs to trust their remote UX writers much more than the team that they share in the same space with. But why is that?
Firstly, you can spend a lot of your time wondering how effective the remote work of your employees is. While in the office, 10 minutes would be enough to go around, keep tabs on people’s assignments, but managing teams remotely can make this process time-consuming.
Secondly, one can easily resort to remote micromanagement instead of efficiently using their team. This can happen if you don’t fully trust your remote employees. It is a common leader’s issue, but one that requires immediate resolution.
You should select future team members as carefully as possible – when hiring your remote UX writers, remember that ability to think independently, cooperate, self-organize one’s work is just as important as professional skills and experience.
It’s important to build trustful relationships with your customers as well as your employees – this is what UX design can help with. You can use certain tips to make your UX design affect users, even drive their decision-making.
When visitors have a great customer experience with your website, they develop more trust for your brand and often engage with your resource again.
2. Facilitate Effective Communication
As a remote leader, it’s your job to find an accessible, easily understandable communication system. You need to find a task manager that is convenient for everyone and it is important that tasks are not confused, lost, or duplicated.
The program should be simple, transparent, without any extra functions that your team doesn’t need. Next, you need to create a single information space where general documents, everything that is necessary for comfortable and efficient work will be stored, allowing employees to be productive at home. There is a multitude of software that facilitates remote cooperation. If you can’t find a suitable program for your needs, order a custom one in advance.
As a result, you will have a permanent system of managing tasks, keeping your remote team in check. A common information space, plus a summary of accepted tasks will help you ensure that everyone speaks the “same language” – the language of your business.
3. Motivate
Mission and values are the main things that bind a remote team.
Such a team really needs motivational meetings and the support more frequently than an in-office team: all participants must understand what the company’s current goals are and what difficulties it faces.
Be sure to support your employees, ask their opinions and encourage dialog.
Practice shows that only an employee who understands and shares the company’s mission and values can work effectively remotely. Define, clearly articulate your goal, mission, objectives, make sure everyone knows, understands, shares them. And don’t forget to praise your staff.
Remote employees need more careful guidance and frequent attention than in-office employees.
You can learn some psychological tactics to carefully motivate your staff. Such techniques like cognitive psychology theories can also be used by your staff, including UX writers and designers, to guide website users to take action.
4. Provide Appropriate Tools for Remote Work
Modern-day companies rely on software a lot to handle various operations and effectively provide various services – different tools, apps are used to take orders, communicate with clients, handle financial operations, etc.
Thus, it is not surprising that managing your office requires the use of technology too. Providing appropriate software solutions is crucial if you want your remote team to operate like clockwork. To make remote teams efficient and productive, companies need to use the right tools.
For example, UX writers need to work in close contact with UX designers, so your remote workers will need effective collaboration tools, software for effective UX writing and editing, video conferencing solutions, etc. Well-known tools for running a successful remote UX workshop are Miro, Sketch, Visio, Mural, Zoom, G-Suite tools (Slides, Docs, Sheets), etc.
5. Give Clear Tasks and Requirements
Confusing tasks and poor ability to prioritize assignments are common issues for remote employees. By working remotely, team members have more freedom, but it may cause confusion and reduces work efficiency. Lack of visibility and control over your team is among the top fears of remote leaders.
When it comes to remote team management, two factors are critical: transparency and accountability. To ensure them, you need to adhere to the following tips:
- Establish clear roles, tasks and responsibilities;
- Check the quality of work, organize proper proofreading – you can outsource editing to a trustworthy academic research paper writing site (check out this trustmypaper review, for instance) or simply facilitate in-house proofreading;
- discuss goals with each team member, so that you were on the same page;
- determine working hours, holidays, meetings and other basic common rules of remote work;
- frequently communicate with your team – hold obligatory common weekly meetings as well as individual meetings when needed;
- track progress of all projects every week, ensure cross-department communication.
- you can check out other remote work tips that will benefit your team – there are plenty of them online.
Final Word
Great remote employees are a secret weapon of many successful modern companies. Rather than relying on people close to the office, they hire the very best talented people from around the world to help the company move forward with its mission.
Some companies prefer to have their entire office work remotely, which has its complexities as well as benefits. Others prefer managing both in-office and remote workers for optimal results. Managing remote, as well as resident teams, can be challenging. We hope that our tips will help you guide and inspire your remote team, ensuring their effective work!