A Manager’s Guide To Review Remote Employees

by Srikant Chellappa Jun 12,2020
Engagedly
PODCAST

The People Strategy Leaders Podcast

with Srikant Chellappa, CEO

Remote working has now become the norm in most organizations around the globe. Managers have begun facing new challenges when it comes to motivating their remote workforce and keeping them engaged.

What’s even more challenging is to keep track of their progress and review their performance. Especially with the performance review season, it is important for managers to be fair and effective in reviewing the performance of their remote employees.

Here are a few tips to reviewing your remote employees and helping them improve.

Understand

Understanding your employees and building trust is often underrated. Some managers have larger teams so it is not humanly possible to understand and build trust with each employee, but there’s always a way if you wish to help the situation. One of such ways is to encourage your employees to have frequent one on ones with you.

Having regular conversations with your employees builds a sense of trust among your team members because of which they’d feel comfortable having conversations about their work and performance with you.

Also read: Are You Suddenly Running A Remote Office?

Another importance of these one on one conversations is that, you , as a manager, understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. This is very important in setting individual and team goals and aligning them with organizational goals.

Monitor

It is important to have goals set in place before you measure the performance of your employees. There are many ways of setting goals. At Engagedly, we use OKRs (Objectives and Key results). This approach is one of the most effective and popular approaches of goal setting. However, different department goals demand different types of goal settings.

Also read: Using SMART Goals For Employee Engagement

No matter which goal setting approach you follow, it is important to know how to measure your progress on those goals.

Review

Though it seems easier to review a team that is traditionally working at an office than review a remote team. Both come with their own set of challenges. As a manager, it is your responsibility to monitor and review the performance of your remote team without any kind of bias.

There are a few challenges that you have to overcome, like the issue of transparency, recency bias, inaccurate performance data.

You can easily overcome the above issues using a performance management software. It is important to look for a performance management software that allows you to see the progress your team makes over time on a goal that has been assigned to them.

Also read: Key Features To Look For In A Performance Management Tool

A performance review software does not magically solve all your remote performance review issues. It is important to utilize features like performance cycles, timely reviews, competencies and OKRs to make it work for your team. It is recommended that managers track their employees’ goals regularly and come up with solutions to improve them using one on one meetings and regular feedback.

Also read: What Are Workplace Competencies?

Giving regular feedback and having frequent discussions with your team members makes reviewing their performance easy even though they are working remotely.


Engagedly is offering a suite of products part of its Remote Work Toolkit free to any organisation, until Sept 30th, 2020. 

The Coronavirus has affected the way we work today and for months to come. Unprecedented events require unprecedented measures. We at Engagedly believe it is our responsibility as socially conscious corporate citizens to help equip organisations with additional tools and resources during this time of crisis.

Get in touch with us to know more about the free remote working tool-kit. 


Request us for a demo to learn how Engagedly can help you manage you remote employees!

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Author
Srikant Chellappa
CEO & Co-Founder of Engagedly

Srikant Chellappa is the Co-Founder and CEO at Engagedly and is a passionate entrepreneur and people leader. He is an author, producer/director of 6 feature films, a music album with his band Manchester Underground, and is the host of The People Strategy Leaders Podcast. He is currently working on his next book, Ikigai at the Workplace, which is slated for release in the fall of 2024.

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