Best Practices For Managing Remote Teams

Running a remote team isn't easy. From isolation and burnout to endless meetings and miscommunication, it can feel like you’re constantly putting out fires.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In this guide, we’ll break down the biggest challenges of managing remote teams and give you practical, proven solutions—so you can build a connected, productive remote team.

Challenges of Managing Remote Teams

1. Isolation and Loneliness

When using apps like Slack, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, most remote workers feel cut off from their team.

Isolation creeps in without the spontaneous interactions they used to get in-office. The quick watercooler chats, grabbing someone to get help after a meeting, or the unexpected lunch games came 'for free' in the old office.

The pandemic added to this problem, as many remote workers saw an overload of meetings and team-building activities that didn’t help the isolation issue but instead created burnout. The burnout led to withdrawing from the meeting overload, which contributed to feeling isolated.

2. Meeting Fatigue

In a remote work environment, putting 60 minute meetings on the calendar is the go-to solution for keeping everyone connected. But they often cause more harm than good.

Calendars get packed with video calls. And while virtual meetings are of course necessary, too many scheduled ones can lead to serious fatigue.

Over-relying on scheduled meetings leaves little time for actual work and doesn’t fix the bigger issues of loneliness, blocked projects, and a fragmented remote company culture.

3. Blocked Work & Collaboration Issues

Collaboration across different time zones can feel like a juggling act. Remote team members often struggle with misaligned schedules, leading to delayed responses or stalled projects. Add to that the confusion about which collaboration tools to use and when, and you’ve got a recipe for blocked workflows.

Scheduled meetings are added to the calendar to deal with it, but it’s hard to find the time with already-full calendars. As your team struggles to collaborate in real time, frustration builds and projects slow down even more.

When scheduling more meetings feels like your only solution but is also the cause of your problems, being a remote team manager feels like an impossible task.

4. Fragmented Culture

Building and maintaining a strong company culture in a remote setting is tough.

With everyone using different platforms like Slack, Zoom, email, Asana, Notion, Google Docs, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Miro, Figma ... culture gets fragmented across this mess. Employees spend time wherever they prefer and none of it actually contains or reinforces your culture.

In the physical office, remote employees worked beside each other in an environment infused with the company’s culture.

Values were written on the wall, spaces were organized to reinforce work styles, desks were personalized, and milestones were drawn on whiteboards.

Combine this with the spontaneous, daily interactions and you get a space that naturally reinforces a company’s culture.

You don’t get this ‘for free’ when working remote. You have to add it back in, and without it, remote employees disengage as they struggle to feel connected to the team and company’s core mission.

How to Effectively Manage a Remote Team

So we just shared a bunch of catastrophic issues and said that the one tool you have to bring your team together - the scheduled meeting - is also the cause of your problems when over-used. Kinda reads hopeless.

Fortunately, it's not. In fact, we believe remote teams have a major advantage over physical teams when these problems are solved.

Let's cover the top solutions to these challenges, so you can shift your remote team over to the winning side.

1. End the scheduled meeting doom loop: use a virtual workspace

If your team uses the standard combination of a video conferencing tool (e.g. Zoom) and a chat tool (e.g. Slack), their days look something like this:

• Spend most of the day on Slack, yet always wonder if someone is online and when you'll get unblocked.
• Hop between isolated zoom meetings, spending a lot of time in meetings but never feeling like you're working together.
• Finally get out of meetings, and go back to wondering when someone is going to unblock you.
• Finally get unblocked, and spend most of that deep work time reading and responding to chat messages.
• End the day fatigued, lonely and with little to show for all the hours you put in.

Working from a virtual workspace (e.g. SoWork) is a completely different experience.

A virtual workspace brings your digital team into one centralized space where communication happens way more naturally.

Think of it as a virtual office where team members have their own desk, work beside each other, and can walk up to someone to collaborate in real time.

This virtual office is customized to look and feel like your culture, and gives your remote team the digital version of a real place to work from.

So, if you want all of the remote management challenges we listed above to disappear overnight, move your team into a virtual workspace like SoWork.

2. Unblock productivity

Nothing drives high performing employees crazier than not being able to get their work done. And for virtual teams, projects are at a higher risk of getting stuck. Timezones, work hour differences, collaboration obstacles, and teammates being fragmented across tools all threaten productivity.

Here are some super effective tips to unblock productivity on your remote team:

1. Set tool expectations. Make sure your team knows exactly what tools to use for what purpose. Set simple ‘rules’, like how often you check Slack each day or when Notion vs Google Docs are used.
2. Remove apps. While you’re at it, try to reduce the number of tools your team is asked to use. Start with tools that have the same purpose (e.g. Asana and Trello are both project management tools), or apps that have a lot of overlap (Slack and whatsapp - does your team need both)? When there’s ambiguity, each teammate will make their own decision about which communication channels to use and this wrecks havoc on productivity. If you adopt a virtual workspace, you can probably collapse your video conferencing, chat, AI summary, ‘culture’ (e.g. donut) and meeting recording tools.
3. Create teamwork blocks. Depending on how many timezones you’re navigating and how flexible work hours are, you may need to establish what we call ‘teamwork blocks’. These are dependable times each day where everyone is around, available, and able to get face-to-face time.In SoWork, we handle coordinating timezones, sending notifications, and providing data on your teamwork blocks to help you improve them.

3. Prioritize team building

As a manager of a remote team, a huge part of your job is to make sure your team is actually a team. Not just a group of people working together.

Why? Because teams with strong relationships are more engaged, collaborate better, and work harder to achieve shared goals.

How do you cultivate team building?

1. Be human. Show an interest in your team members and make it easy for them to show an interest in you. This doesn’t mean you have to spend a third of your Monday meetings talking about everyone’s weekends. Instead, encourage it in all the little moments. Decorate your desks, customize your avatars, acknowledge someone’s haircut, or check in on a struggling employee’s well-being. It’s the little moments day-to-day that add up to a more human experience.
2. Bake it into your week. Check out our ‘Create a great weekly cadence’ section below for how to make team building a natural part of your week without detracting from deep work or meeting focus.

4. Build trust and accountability

Have you ever heard the phrase ‘kind over nice’?

Kind teammates say what needs to be said, even when it’s hard to do or could upset someone. On the flip side, a nice teammate will be overly focused on how someone might feel or worried about taking away from the team having fun. They won’t find a way to say the hard things that need to be said.

A work example: someone committed to an action and didn’t take it. Do you find a healthy way to say something?

High trust, high accountability remote teams will say something. And they'll be stronger and higher performing because of it.

But you can’t have a team of kind over nice people without a strong foundation of trust and lots of reps practicing healthy accountability.

Here’s how you manage your direct reports in a way that builds trust, personal responsibility, and accountability:

• Set clear expectations. Make sure everyone knows what is expected of them. What work they’re committing to each week, when and where they work, how to collaborate with their team, what ‘done’ looks like, what the cultural principles are, and how to handle challenges.
• Write it down. Commitments, goals, action items. Document, give everything an owner, and make sure there’s a due date. Make it public and part of your meeting practices.
• Build it into your weekly cadence. Review open action items, assess goal progress, check on commitments. Make it a part of your remote team’s operating mode to be open and accountable about their work. This allows you to avoid micromanaging and instead push responsibility into the open, onto the owner of the work.
• Model it. Whatever it is you want to see from your team as a manager, you need to model it 2x better. Make information default open. Have healthy conflict in public rather than in direct messages or private meetings. Follow the practices you set out. Share your failures and learnings. Hold yourself accountable to your own commitments.
• Have healthy, hard conversations. Whatever your management style is, you’ll need a way to have hard conversations. When having these conversations, stick to one-on-one. Refer back to the expectations you’ve worked hard to make clear. Explain where the disconnect is and the impact on the team. Seek information, and involve the remote teammate in setting an action plan to solve the problem. Follow up, and be generous and quick with positive feedback on improvements you see.

5. Create a great weekly meeting cadence

Creating a routine that your team can follow each week is crucial for remote work success. We call this a meeting cadence.

A weekly meeting cadence let's you design an energizing, productive week made up of the types of connections your team needs. And for your team, it allows them to fall into a rhythm that powers great work.

Here are some of the main units to include in your weekly meeting cadence.

1. Priority Setting

Goal: every teammate knows exactly what to complete next week

Suggested day: Friday

It’s common for remote teams to have varying start times, so this ensures everyone is executing (not figuring things out) on Monday. On our team, shifting priority setting from Monday to the Friday before bought us two extra productive days.

Tips:

1. Focus on the what, not the how.

• These meetings should be short and reasonably high level. For example, a teammate should walk away knowing that next week they’re going to work on revamping the website blog page.
• They should know what the goal is, where the details are, and who to collaborate with.
• Often, these meetings can turn into ‘how’ sessions. How will we handle this known bug on the blog page? This is important, but it adds noise to a priority setting meeting and should be handled separately.

2. Set measurable commitments.

• Every teammate should have clear commitments for the week that they believe they can complete.
• Each commitment should be objective and measurable. For example, the updated blog page is shipped to customers. Instead of: work on the new blog.
• Write them down in a shared place that your team will revisit during the week.

2. Collaboration Time

Goal: teammates are online for a shared block of time and generally available to collaborate

Suggested day: every day for 2-4 hours

Tips:

If you’re using a virtual workspace like SoWork, the app will handle all of these for you. Otherwise:

• Find a time that works. Remember to consider timezones and working hours.
• Schedule it. Make sure it’s in your team’s calendar
• Communicate. Let your team know what this block is and why it’s so beneficial to them. Check out our communication suggestions. If you’re not using a virtual workspace, make sure you tell your team where to meet!
• Remind. Set up or send out reminders so that your remote team builds a habit of attending these collaboration blocks.
• Follow up. Assess how the blocks went and adapt them as needed. After a few weeks, assess if productivity is improving. Are projects moving along more smoothly? Are teammates feeling less blocked? Is your remote team spending less time on coordinating and more time doing great work?

3. Check-ins and standups

Goal: unblock execution, make sure goals are on track

Suggested day: 2-5x per week

Tips:

• Sync is better than async. You can cover more in less time, and accountability is higher. But if sync isn’t possible, do async
• Create action items. All blockers should get an action item with a clear owner and by-when. Share this list with the team after the meeting and make sure action items get completed. Follow up on open items at the next standup
• Do it at the start of a collaboration block. If you have the standup first, your team can split off and resolve all the blocking action items or collaborate immediately after the meeting. This little tweak in timing can be the difference of getting an extra day of productivity!

4. Week Review and Celebrations

Goal: hold each other accountable to commitments made, celebrate progress made

Suggested day: Friday

Tips:

• Start by reviewing the goals your team had for the week. This builds accountability to commitments and results made at the start of the week.
• Involve the team. Get team members to show off work they created or early data.
• Try to tie celebration to the end goal. If an exciting feature was shipped, it’s great that it has nice animations but is it having the intended effect on the product metric? This helps reinforce what counts as a win on your team.
• Celebrate! The big stuff and the little stuff. In a remote environment, team members are more likely to feel isolated and disconnected. Acknowledge hard work, celebrate wins.

5. Play

Goal: have fun and deepen relationships

Suggested day: Depends. See ‘Tips’.

Tips:

• Use a virtual workspace like SoWork to inject this into your work naturally. This will prevent needing to put ‘fun time’ on the calendar and forcing it into the schedule.
• If you’re using a virtual workspace, set it up to allow play to happen when it suits your team. Create themed coffee break zones with games built in. Practice taking your breaks in these zones and encourage your remote team to join you.
• At the start or end of a meeting, kick off a game of ‘Tank Wars’. This is a game built into the SoWork office, is SO much fun, and only takes a few minutes to get your team laughing hard.
• If you’re not using a virtual workspace, try adding 5-minute games to the end of meetings. Start with your end of week review meeting, when your team is already winding down for the week and ready for social interactions.
• Every few months, organize a bigger team bonding activity like a hackathon, escape room, or book club. Need ideas? We’ve got a list of the most popular ones