At the time of writing, most of the world is two years into telecommuting — fully or partially. Most team leaders have tested different management tools and tactics and formed informed opinions about the benefits and drawbacks of working from home.
Statistically, communication and team management are the biggest challenges leaders face.
As a fully remote company helping other teams transition to working online and improve communication between teammates, the oVice team decided to share our ways of handling the most common remote team management challenges.
Here are our answers to 7 pressing remote team communication questions.

1. How Do You Check if Employees Are “On the Clock”

As most teammates have Slack, messengers, and collaboration tools on their smartphones, they can reply to messages when they are not at their desks. As a result, managers have no way of knowing whether an employee is actually working throughout the day.
Since our team’s key project is a virtual office for remote teams, we use our own tool to control availability. At any given moment, we can take a look at the office space and see who is working.
When a manager wants to get a quick status update from an engineer, he can walk up to him for a casual team. Through oVice, we can seamlessly connect with people in our branch offices in Japan and South Korea.
As for the alternatives not involving virtual offices, you can try the following:

2. How Do You Get Status Updates From Teammates

While scrum and standup meetings are helpful in bringing the team together and sharing what everyone is up to, there’s no point in holding them “just because”. If you, as a manager, stopped getting useful information out of daily scrums, here are a few ways to improve their yield:

3. How to Onboard New Hires Seamlessly

For a new hire, joining a full-remote company can be a nightmare — you don’t know anybody and have no clue where to start. Everything is moving too fast and everyone seems too busy to spend extra time with you.
Managers need to acknowledge the need to mentor and oversee new hires. In our experience, outside of the virtual office where newcomers can casually ask senior members technical or work-related questions, the following was extremely useful:

4. How to Encourage Employee Training Remotely

Remote work made organizing company-wide workshops and knowledge-sharing meetings a lot harder, making developers have to walk the extra mile and find ways to encourage teammates to grow professionally.
The good news is that remote work doesn’t put a stop to employee training. Here’s how we go about ensuring project growth and development:

5. How to Avoid Micromanagement

In a distributed workplace, it’s easier to give in to the temptation of breathing down each teammate’s neck with a “Hey, just checking in” than it ever was at the office. This kind of micromanagement eats at a team leader’s time and no one on the team likes it.
Here’s how oVice managers seamlessly oversee engineers at oVice without being push-overs.

6. How to Keep Meetings Natural

Smooth interpersonal communication is one of the benefits of office-based workplaces. In a remote team, it’s common to lose focus during meetings, multitask, or silently wait until the discussion is over.
To create a smooth communication flow, engineering team leaders can:

7. How to Synchronize the Office Team and The Remote Team

A hybrid workplace — allowing people to choose whether they come to the office or work from home — is a new trend. On the one hand, it gives employees a chance to escape distractions awaiting them at their places, as well as meet in person and build connections with teammates.
On the other hand, the teammates who don’t want to commute and prefer working from home can keep doing their jobs remotely.
Running a hybrid team is a unique challenge, as it creates a disconnect between the office team and the remote fraction of the team. Often, the distributed half of the team is not in the loop on the things in-house employees are doing so engineers can feel left out.
To bridge the gap, hybrid team managers should:
As an idea, a product, and a team, oVice was born during the COVID pandemic. Our team is fully remote — some teammates meet in real life, others have never spoken in person. Nevertheless, in two years, we’ve expanded to over 150 employees and keep growing.
Through our virtual office technology, we help remote and hybrid teams stay connected. Since its launch, oVice is supporting over 2,200 organizations all over the world.
Recently, we revamped the interface of the platform. The update is live on the oVice tour space - check it out and learn how virtual offices can help your team stay connected and productive. We are excited to see your feedback and answer questions.