A Project Manager’s Guide to Leading Remote TeamsPublished Mar. 13, 2020 by Eileen O'Loughlin in Project Management

Flexible work arrangements are increasingly necessary, but they come with inherent challenges. Follow these best practices to set your teams up for success.

If you’re a project manager, it’s not a question of if but when you’ll be asked to manage a remote team. In fact, if you’re reading this and you haven’t yet led a remote team, I’d like to hear your story. Do you work on an Antarctic oil rig? Are you a time traveler from the 1950s? Remote work is becoming the new normal. With improved technology, rising transportation costs, and the potential for spreading viruses, the reasons for working remotely are starting to outweigh those for working together on-site. Flexible work arrangements (FWAs) are also an important recruiting and retention tool for businesses. And if your flexible work option isn’t as attractive as your competitors’, employees won’t stick around: A Gallup study found that 54% of employees would leave for a job that offered them flexible work hours, and 37% would leave for a job that offered the option to work remotely at least part time. However, distance in time and place adds significant complexity to projects, requiring techniques, tools, and soft skills that may be outside a project manager’s traditional purview. With flexible work arrangements urgently becoming an employment requirement, project leaders need to get up to speed, and fast. Don’t have the technology to enable remote work? That’s a problem. Only 8% of respondents to a recent  survey said that they can’t work remotely because they lack the technology. If you’re one of these companies, get your collaboration and web conferencing tools up to date as soon as possible. In this article, we’ll highlight five challenges inherent in leading remote teams and/or distributed workers and offer recommendations as to how managers can help their teams overcome them. We’ll also share advice from project professionals currently leading remote teams, so you can hear from other business leaders and managers on how they tackle these issues.

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