8 Tips for Managing Projects When Everyone Is Working From Home

Workers who never imagined they would be working from home have been thrust into the new reality of remote work. This can be especially challenging for project teams accustomed to the traditional roles and processes that govern project management. “The scope of project management gets even tougher if the work is done remotely, as remote work comes with its own set of pitfalls,” writes certified public accountant Bryce Welker, founder of Crush The CPA Exam.

The looming question on the minds of project managers as they navigate the new normal has become, “How can I still meet project goals with my team now working remotely?”

Though successfully managing projects with remote teams is challenging, it certainly isn’t impossible. Here are some tips from project managers and business analysts to help even the most experienced leaders keep projects on schedule and remote teams on task.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Communication becomes exponentially more difficult when project teams and stakeholders are distributed outside of the office. Consistent, meaningful and clear communication is crucial when managing projects with remote teams.

In fact, don’t hesitate to over-communicate. “It is important to train your team to understand that when transitioning to, or working within, a remote working culture, that it is best to over-communicate - even if it feels unnecessary,” writes David Baker at PM Times. Just be conscious that team members don’t feel smothered or micromanaged to the point that it inhibits their productivity.

The most important thing to remember when working with a remote team is that when communication starts to break down, productivity will suffer. 

Use Multiple Communication Methods

While you are doing all you can to stay connected, don’t rely on one method of communication to keep team members engaged. “Work at building virtual teams that feel connected and stay connected regularly,” says Moira Alexander, founder of PMWorld 360 Magazine. Do this by using different communication methods depending on the details of a project, such as time and information sensitivities, the audience and the purpose of messages, says Alexander.  

Emails, instant messages and text messages are all available to keep remote teams connected and on task. Using only these tools may put a strain on morale as team members lose the human touch.

That’s why it’s important to use other, more humanizing forms of communication, write Heidi K. Gardner and Ivan Matviak at Harvard Business Review. Video conferences, web chats and phone calls are not only more personable ways to communicate, but they also contribute to improved decision making by facilitating debate among team members, they explain.

Conduct More Virtual Meetings

Meetings matter in managing projects. That doesn’t change just because everyone has to work from home. In fact, meetings become more important in situations where stakeholders are distributed. You may need to conduct more meetings to keep projects flowing smoothly. 

“More frequent team meetings will strengthen team cohesion and collaboration and help eliminate any frustrations that could otherwise come with team members not having close access to the project leader,” says Brad Egeland, information technology and project management consultant.

You can have productive and engaging meetings even though you can’t all physically congregate or pop into each others’ offices. Virtual meetings allow remote workers to experience the collaborative benefits of in-person meetings. With virtual meeting tools, such as Zoom and GoToMeeting, you can host real-time video conferences, stream presentations and share screens among participants. There’s very little that you can’t do in a virtual meeting that you can do in an in-person meeting, except serve coffee and snacks.

Keep in mind virtual meetings come with a similar set of challenges as in-person meetings do. Business analyst Paula Bell advises leaders to adequately prepare to conduct efficient and productive virtual meetings and to plan to expeditiously address action items.

Though it might seem like meetings get in the way of productivity, with a remote team, they are necessary to keep everyone on track and updated. 

Make Sure Roles and Goals are Clearly Defined

One of the biggest challenges that remote project managers face is keeping everyone on task. It is easy for individuals to lose sight of what they are supposed to be doing and the end goal of a project when routine is broken, workers are distributed and access to project managers is limited.

That’s why you have to make sure that individual project roles and responsibilities are clearly defined at all times with a remote team. Doing so is considered a best practice for overcoming the challenges of remote project management, writes Reinhard Wagner, managing director at Tiba Management in Munich. 

It’s also important to keep everyone’s eyes on the prize as you work toward a solution. When teams are distributed, it is easy to lose focus and veer off the path to meeting project goals. Be sure to clearly define a project’s “purpose, goals, and success factors,” writes project management professional Dick Billows, founder of project management training organization of 4PM.com.

The more specific you are in explaining roles and goals, the more the team will understand what their contributions need to be and the more effective they can be when working from home. 

Plan for Flexible Working Hours

When working remotely, you lose the ability to spontaneously collaborate. You will have to put more effort into scheduling meetings and communications when the majority of your team is available. This also means keeping an 8-5 work schedule while working from home is going to be nearly impossible, especially if your team and stakeholders are distributed across different time zones. 

To meet the needs of everyone, you will need to be willing to adapt your working hours and encourage your team to do the same. You will also need to plan ahead by documenting everyone’s location, time zone and work hours, and then noting the overlaps, writes Eileen O’Loughlin, senior project management analyst at software review site Capterra. Share the information with your team and regularly update it so everyone knows when others are available.

By staying flexible, project managers keep themselves accessible to their teams for easier collaboration.

Adopt Project Collaboration Tools

Successful remote project management hinges on adopting the right project collaboration tools. Communication, file sharing, task management and status tracking all must be efficiently managed, which can be nearly impossible with distributed teams if you aren’t using the right tools. 

Spreadsheets, emails and phone calls aren’t going to cut it when everyone is in a different location. Cloud-based tools are the solution that all project managers need to do this successfully. With cloud-based software, everyone, no matter their physical location, has access to everything they need to fulfill their project responsibilities.  

Cloud-based tools that can be accessed from any device allow everyone to collaborate in real time, facilitating more streamlined workflows and situational clarity that would otherwise be interrupted by the physical distance between workers, writes management consultant Darleen DeRosa, Ph.D.

Without the right tools, your distributed team will struggle to meet project goals. 

Focus on Making Your Team a Team

Though your team may be separated by distance, they are still a team. Project managers need to make the effort to build camaraderie among team members, which can be difficult when you can’t put everyone into a room to just chat. 

“Working remotely makes it harder to go from being just a workgroup to being a true team,” writes Chris Sims, certified scrum trainer and founder of Agile Learning Labs. To do it well, he says project managers must intentionally “create frequent real-time connections between team members.”

One way to do this is to have virtual connection sessions where team members can engage each other without a formal agenda, writes change management practitioner Natasha Brown. In such meetings, encourage everyone to share their likes and dislikes so they get to know each other and understand everyone’s different character traits. This will build unity and solidify your distributed team.

That sense of solidarity will go a long way to creating an atmosphere where everyone is supportive of each other on the path to ensuring a project’s success.

Celebrate Successes

Celebrating successes during a project is a big part of building team unity and encouraging everyone to keep working hard. When everyone is working from home, however, it can be difficult to bring them all together to celebrate small and large victories. Planning a virtual celebration requires ingenuity and creativity.

If you have the time to plan it, think of ways for your team to have the same physical experience, writes principal business systems consultant Joan Davis. Some ideas are arranging for everyone to eat a pizza or open up gifts (sent in advance) at the same time, she explains. 

If you don’t have that much time to plan ahead, make arrangements for everyone to play virtual games in a meeting. What you do or how you celebrate doesn’t matter as much as calling attention to achievements and celebrating them as a team.

Managing a remote project team is not easy, especially if it is an unintentional situation that wasn’t preplanned. It can feel like you are a little lost at sea as you try to navigate through new processes and procedures. Just remember that everyone on the team is feeling the same way. Embrace the challenge: You can achieve your project goals working remotely; it will just require a shift in the way everyone thinks and works.

Though it may have been as a result of the COVID-19 quarantine, working remotely could well become your new normal.