Managing Remote Teams: 17 Ways to Stay Connected

Managing remote teams well comes down to one discipline: connection that once happened naturally in an office now has to be built deliberately. The number of leaders who manage remotely keeps growing (Gallup's ongoing workplace research has tracked the shift for years), and the managers who thrive are not the ones with the most tools; they are the ones who build deliberate rhythms of contact and visibility, with recognition to match. This guide collects seventeen field-tested practices for staying connected to a distributed team, organized by the kind of connection each one builds, plus the operating cadence and communication agreements that hold it all together. It is written for the manager doing the work and for the talent development leaders who build these habits across a manager population; the closing section speaks to them directly. It is part of our leadership development work with managers at every level.

What changes when you manage a remote team

Three things change when you manage a remote team. Visibility shifts from physical presence to recognized outcomes, so expectations and check-ins need more structure. Communication loses its "in the moment" opportunities, so information has to be shared deliberately. And team and group belonging needs to be managed. The practices below address all three of these truths about managing remote teams, and all are easy to implement without needing a budget.

These options to stay connected with remote teams evolved from our work coaching leaders within a U.S.-based insurance technology organization, who once were all centrally located but later expanded to have additional offices and managers with hybrid or fully remote team members. The managers sought ways to build a sense of community, communication and engagement without overly contrived or time-intensive actions. We suggested options to get the managers started and, as part of follow-up, managers shared best practices as they had success.

17 ways to stay connected with your remote team

A few practices to consider as you manage your remote team include:

Daily rhythm

1. Greet people every morning or at the start of their workday, if different than your own. Use a brief email or IM; consider including a GIF or photo attachment.
2. Announce news often; don't wait for it to be a big event to share day-to-day information. Think about it as if you were sitting next to one another, and share tidbits through the day.
3. Let people know of any delays in responses; a quick "got it and will respond as soon as I can" is helpful to keeping connections.
4. Use video every chance you get and as much as you can.

Meetings and one-on-ones

5. Schedule a full hour for one-on-ones each week with team members, and be very reluctant to cancel them.
6. Dial into meetings early to have time to chat; allot the five minutes leading into a meeting as social time.
7. Look for opportunities to get team input on decisions and idea generation. Create a group document for brainstorming and idea mapping.
8. Balance schedule inconvenience; take your turn for early mornings or late evenings.

Rituals and celebrations

9. Set up and hold a recurring virtual coffee break. Send mugs to everyone to start the tradition.
10. Hold virtual celebrations for events such as birthdays and work anniversaries.
11. Send a periodic "team in a box": something everyone receives for being part of your team. An example is an inspirational quote in a small frame that can be changed out over time.
12. Run a group challenge (such as number of steps in a day) to create a sense of community.
13. Mail hard-copy notes for special (and not-so-special) occasions. Birthday and thank-you cards become visual reminders of you and the team.

Workspace and transparency

14. Set up a team workspace (Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.) and populate it routinely.
15. Be rigorous in your transparency about scheduling; go beyond access to a shared calendar and set a group norm about how and when to share schedules.
16. Keep a connection checklist: a table with every team member and the date of your last real contact. Fill in a date each time you've connected, and let the empty cells tell you who to reach next.
17. Get together face-to-face at least once a year. When together, take a group photo and ensure everyone has a physical copy before leaving.

The operating cadence that makes the remote management practices stick

Managers who set a predictable rhythm for managing their workforce have greater connectivity and can expect improved team cohesiveness and engagement. The cadence we coach managers toward is to hold a weekly hour-long one-on-one per person (Practice 5 in the list above, and an anchor of the system), a weekly team meeting with rotating social openers, a monthly connection-checklist review to catch anyone who may be drifting, and a quarterly reset where the team looks at its own norms and adjusts them. A connection checklist, where managers track who has engaged and the date of last engagement, can be part of this operating cadence because it shows when a manager's good intentions don't match the true actions recorded on the checklist. The data may surprise managers who think they are routinely connecting across their teams, but realize they have not genuinely spoken with a team member in a week and a half.

The weekly one-on-one, made worth an hour

Practice 5, "Schedule a full hour for one-on-ones each week with team members," anchors the remote management system. That hour might include:

Keep a shared running document per person so both sides add topics through the week, which converts the one-on-one from a status meeting into the team member's hour. Managers who protect this rhythm report that most other remote-management problems shrink, because the channel for catching issues early exists and focuses prevention.

Onboarding someone you may never meet in person

A new hire's first remote weeks shape their sense of belonging for months afterward. Build a first-week plan that includes:

• A day-one video welcome from the manager.
• An onboarding buddy who does daily check-ins for two weeks.
• A scheduled introduction call with each teammate (fifteen minutes at least, with one prompt such as "what should I know about working with you?"). As an example, in our team, we have a shared document for each team member entitled "A User's Guide to…". Those documents include personal information that team members want to be common knowledge, preferences for communication, style-based information and fun facts such as favorite snacks.
• Projects and assignments that allow for "sure thing" small wins that you visibly acknowledge.
• Adding the new team member to every ritual from the first occurrence, including the coffee break and the team-in-a-box, if you are using them.

Pay attention to the connection checklist with new employees. Be sure that a new remote hire is not the name with the oldest last-contact date in your checklist.

As part of our work in designing an executive onboarding package for a well-known retail brand, as well as their all-employee brand onboarding toolkit, we built a checklist that would work well for both in-person and remote scenarios. Some of these same principles applied.

Working fairly across time zones

Distributed teams depend on fairness even more than they depend on tools. Rotate meeting times so the same region does not always take the evening slot (Practice 8, "Balance schedule inconvenience," applies to the manager first), default to asynchronous work with documented decisions so overlap hours are spent on genuinely interactive work, protect at least one meeting-free block per week in every zone and record key sessions so absence is not exclusion. State the fairness rules in the communication agreements; unstated fairness intentions may erode under scheduling pressure.

Setting communication agreements for a remote team

Distributed teams run better on explicit agreements than on assumed norms. It is worth discussing and documenting things such as:

• Which channel is for what type of communication (urgent versus asynchronous versus social).
• Expected response windows by channel.
• Camera norms for different meeting types.
• Core overlap hours across time zones.
• How decisions get documented so that people who were asleep can catch up.

One shared agreements page, revisited quarterly, prevents most of the friction that remote teams attribute to personality.

Talent development, organizational development practitioners and those in similar roles can support team functioning by facilitating sessions where team members discuss and agree on practices that each finds important. In our work with teams and managers of remote groups, a single, focused facilitated session can clear up glitches and prevent lack of engagement. If you don't have access to this type of support inside your organization, we have seen many managers be successful in running their own agreement and norm-setting sessions using the list above as a point of discussion with the team.

PPS International Limited has developed manager-led tools to help acclimate teams to working with hybrid team members in some of the most high-pressured scenarios managers find themselves in, including working with a team during a merger or acquisition, a business restructuring, a business transition and when facing unprecedented growth or business decline. In most cases, team members are pleased to have discussions and clarity on operating expectations; they don't always need a perfectly facilitated session to make progress.

Recognition on a remote team

Recognition isn't always seamless when there is no team within earshot to quickly acknowledge good work. Because of this, the frequency of recognition can go down with remote employees. Be sure to describe contributions in team meetings with enough detail that an individual's work is recognizable. Put wins in the team workspace. Keep the hard-copy notes from Practice 13, "Mail hard-copy notes for special (and not-so-special) occasions," in your rotation, and don't be reluctant to send physical mail to team members. Physical mail carries surprising weight in a digital world. Consider putting into practice the discipline of one deliberate act of recognition per week, checked against the connection checklist, so it spreads across the team rather than pooling on the most visible members.

Designing the weekly team meeting

The weekly team meeting has to carry a lot of connection with a remote team, and be purposeful. Most managers are experts at running and participating in meetings. When working with a hybrid team or fully remote team members, one option that can be very useful is to use a rotating social prompt at the start of the team meeting. Along those same lines, rotate who runs various segments of the meeting so that it belongs to the team. This has a developmental advantage—it allows communication and visibility practice for those in the facilitation role.

Watching engagement from a distance

Disengagement is harder to see from a distance. Signals a manager may notice include:

• Cameras going dark where they used to be active.
• One-on-ones getting shorter or rescheduled by the team member.
• Contributions shifting from ideas to status updates.
• Silence in the team workspace from someone who used to post.

None of these alone means trouble, but a pattern across two or three of them is a prompt for a different kind of one-on-one. Connection practices can prevent issues, but attentive managers are a key detection point.

When your team is remote some days and together on others

If teams are together some days and remote others, be sure to capitalize on the commute with connection and collaboration. Save the remote days for individual one-on-ones and other individualized connection practices. For sessions where part of the team is in a room and part is remote, the design discipline in our guide to hybrid participant groups can apply to team meetings as much as to training.

Adapting the practices to your team's size

With a team of four, run nearly everything personally. For instance, the weekly hours fit easily, and the rituals can be intimate. In teams of eight to twelve, protect one-on-ones first, delegate ritual ownership (a rotating coffee-break host, a celebrations owner) and lean harder on the checklist because drift hides in bigger numbers. For even larger groups, connection has to cascade. Build the same practices into your direct reports' own management rhythms and hold them accountable for connection the way you hold them accountable for results, because at that scale your team's experience of belonging mostly arrives through the managers you manage.

For talent development leaders: building these habits across your managers

Connection practices can be taught. In one engagement with a defense subcontractor organization, we supported leaders who were new to managing remote employees with audio-based learning paired with conversational infographics, part of a broader microlearning approach that fits the schedules of busy managers. In the insurance technology organization described above, the practices spread through coaching and a follow-up loop in which managers shared what had worked, which cost the organization little beyond the coaching itself.

For those responsible for manager capability across an organization, a few approaches tend to work:

• Build the practices into manager onboarding and new manager development, so the operating cadence and the connection checklist are habits from the first weeks in the role rather than repairs made later.
• Give managers a shared playbook, such as the seventeen practices and the communication agreements list above, and let cohorts of managers compare what they have tried in a facilitated session or a peer discussion group.
• Watch the signals the organization can see: one-on-one cadence in calendars, engagement and pulse-survey items about manager support and connection, and voluntary turnover on remote and hybrid teams compared with co-located ones.
• Use the agreement and norm-setting sessions described above as a service talent development offers to teams, especially during mergers, restructurings and periods of rapid growth or decline, when connection tends to break first.

For organizations building this capability at scale, our Leading Hybrid Teams program covers the skills side of the same territory, and our leadership development practice can adapt the practices above into manager training for your organization.

Frequently asked questions

How do you manage a remote team effectively?

Build deliberate connection rhythms such as weekly hour-long one-on-ones, explicit communication agreements, a maintained team workspace and regular rituals that create belonging. Manage by outcomes rather than visible activity, and use a connection checklist so no team member quietly drifts out of contact without you as manager noticing.

What is the biggest mistake managers make with remote teams?

Managers sometimes make the mistake of letting connections run on autopilot with their remote team members. In an office, relationships maintain themselves through ambient contact. Remotely, a manager who does not schedule connections simply has less of it every month. The second most common mistake managers make is canceling one-on-ones when the calendar tightens. The team notices which commitments get canceled first, and not only do managers who frequently cancel lose connection, they may be signaling that relationships don't matter.

How do you build trust in a remote team?

Trust is built through consistency. Keep one-on-one time sacred, do what you said you would do between meetings, share information early and as you have it, and extend trust first by managing outcomes instead of monitoring activity. The practices in this guide support that consistency. Each ritual you keep shows the team they can rely on you.

What tools do you need to manage a remote team?

Most managers don't need a high number of tools to manage a remote team. The basics are a video platform, a team workspace such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, a shared calendar with disclosed and documented availability and shared documents for collaboration. Every practice in this guide runs on that stack. Tools can make connections easier, but they do not create them. A manager with the seventeen practices and basic tools tends to outperform a manager with premium software and no rhythm, which is why the practices come first in this guide and the tool list comes last.

How often should you meet with remote employees?

A weekly one-on-one of a full hour per team member is the strongest single practice on this list, supplemented by a weekly team meeting and informal contact through the week. Protect the one-on-one; its frequency can flex for highly experienced team members, but only after the relationship is established.

Where to start

Pick three practices from the seventeen: one daily, one ritual, one structural. Add the connection checklist, write your team's communication agreements in your next team meeting and treat the one-on-one hour as your firmest commitment. Our printable version of all seventeen practices is below for your planning file.

Download 17 Ways to Stay Connected When Remote (PDF)