Managing projects in a remote team
The Lombard Accountants team understand that we’re living in a world where remote and hybrid working are now the norm. Driven by lockdowns and the pandemic, businesses have been forced to adopt a ‘working from home’ approach. And this ability to work remotely has driven productivity and efficiency for some companies but can create its own challenges.
When a whole team, or even a percentage of a team, are no longer sitting in the same office space, there are some very specific considerations to bear in mind such as what’s the best way to communicate and how do you manage this remote team effectively? Where is all the company and customer data stored? How can people collaborate? What’s the best way to communicate?
If you’re going to make it easy to manage a project with a remote or hybrid team, you absolutely need to think through these questions and come up with some practical answers. Here are some suggestions from the Lombard Accountants team:
- Video-based meetings and project kick-offs – the obvious problem of not being in the same room is that the project team can’t see or hear each other. And over the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen video meetings and platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams come into their own. Having your kick-off meeting and regular team catch-ups via video calls helps everyone to feel involved, and helps to create more of a ‘team spirit’ between a group of people who may be hundreds, or even thousands, of miles apart.
- Capturing actions and briefs – during meetings, you need good ways of taking down notes, capturing actions or summarising what’s been discussed with the client or the team. Using a cloud-based document system, like Microsoft 365, Google Docs or Evernote allows you to capture these ideas as rough notes.
- Job management and tracking tools – once the project is underway, it’s important to monitor progress, record which tasks have been completed and stay in control of a disparate group of people all working in different places. Project management solutions like Asana or Trello can be great tools for tracking the progress of a project and keeping everyone on top of things. When these tools are cloud-based, everyone has access 24/7 from any internet-enabled location, so that makes it far easier for everyone to be kept in the loop – and for people managers to see how each person is tracking.
- Collaborating together as a team – working together from a distance is another hurdle for a dispersed team to overcome. But with cloud-based collaboration tools, like Monday, Slack or Teams, you can quickly create an online space for the team to share documents, have online chats, upload different document versions and generally boost the collaborative process. The easier you make it to communicate and share files/info, the fewer challenges you’ll face as the project develops.
If you would like to discuss your business needs. Call Lombard Accountants on (01) 678 9960 or email hello@la.ie
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