Managing remote staff can be quite challenging. People complain of feeling disconnected or isolated. Fair enough too, remote workers often miss that close contact, and may feel detached from what’s happening in the business.

This brings a series of challenges to your door. So today let’s have a bit of a fun countdown. Counting down the five ways you can help keep your remote workers connected and on track.

“What gets measured gets managed” Peter Drucker

Five

Firstly, you can set five goals to maintain focus and motivation. Five is the top limit for the amount of goals you have running for each of your remote workers …  you really should have no more than five goals  for each team member to work towards. Two or three is actually the ideal. If you have a lot going on in your business though, make sure there’s no more than five.

Four

Now we go to four weeks. You should regularly check in with your remote team members to acknowledge their achievements and how they’re going. Routinely checking in every four weeks is perfect. So every four weeks, you’re saying, “How are you going? How can we make this better for you?” Of course, if they’ve earned a reward, then go ahead and give them one.

Three

Three brings us to three months. A quarterly review. Give your team members three chances to meet their monthly performance goals in a row. Then when you regroup for a larger review, you can stop and say, “Hey you’ve done really well this quarter, but here are the areas that you can improve on.”

Two

Two brings us to two buddies! You should get people buddied up. Everything is better with a buddy to run things by. They can work to support each other, and track each other’s performance. This helps performance in a positive, socially connected way. A little encouragement and camaraderie can do wonders.

One

Which brings us to number one. This means remembering that the best performance happens when people are allowed to do one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth! It just means doing a lot of things in an average way. Your brain – everyone’s brain – can only do one thing well at a time. So encourage focus in the work that’s being done.

So there you go! Five ways to make managing your remote staff a little easier. No one doubts how difficult managing remote staff can be. With this easy countdown you can ease a few of those challenges and concentrate on growing your business!