How to Manage a Virtual Team Effectively

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What is a Virtual Team?

As I’ve stated before, outsourcing is the key to solopreneurship. What starts with just yourself will most likely involve someone close to you (like a partner), then may require you to get help even further afield. Expand further and you’re building up your own team.

A virtual team is a collective of people that collaborate remotely. When building up a business, you may recruit people to join a virtual team to multiply the amount of work you can complete. There are only so many hours in the day, so (provided you can afford to do so) paying others to do work for you greatly increases your business(es) productivity.

There will be growing pains. Here, I’ll go into the ways to make it as simple as possible to manage your team through day-to-day work.

How Do You Prepare the Team?

Thorough training has to come first. It has to be done on a one-to-one basis to ensure that all of your team is up to standard on the specific task that they have been set to do. The nature of your business will determine how this is achieved, but this is the foundation to everything. Done well, and you reduce the amount of help your team your team members require for their day-to-day activities.

I’m a big fan of process documentation. Every member of my team, and people I call upon for one-off work, is given a fully-illustrated document to run them through the work I would like them to do. They can refer back to that at any time to remind them how to complete their work properly and they can answer their own questions.

Along with this, it’s helpful to write down exactly what other members of the team are responsible (if you need them to collaborate without you), and to explain the tools you use. Frontload all the explaining.

Proper training and written documentation helps massively, as it cuts down how much input is required from yourself in the everyday, simpler tasks required of your business.

What Tools Should You Use?

With everything else in place, it’s time to apply some tools to get things in order. Whether it’s just yourself and one other person, or your virtual team consists of 8 other people, all of the following tools will be applicable for you.

Google Drive

The most fundamental suite of them all. I’m not sure what type of business wouldn’t benefit from storing some files on the cloud with Google Drive. You know those process documents I was talking about earlier? Well this is the perfect place for them. Put them alongside work documents and whatever your team needs constant access to.

Trello

As a task manager, Trello is unmatched. I find it ideal for personal work tasks, and just as effective with a team of people. Find yourself a good template to build upon and you can keep track of ongoing activity, future activity, set goals and make objectives clear to everyone involved.

Slack

For team communication, I’ve found nothing better than Slack. Email is overrated, and you’ll soon realise email is an inefficient way to communicate to groups of people, versus an instant messaging system like this. A major benefit is its channels – separating conversations and potentially team members into silos, or sharing to the whole group. As well as chatting, it’s the ideal platform for internal file-sharing (in instances where Google Drive won’t suffice).