2026 Guide to Managing Remote Teams

Key takeaways

Remote work remains popular, as employees value flexibility and companies benefit from broader access to talent and lower costs.

• According to joint research, employees are willing to take a 25 percent pay cut to work remotely [1].

• Remote teams function best when leaders set clear communication norms and trust employees to deliver outcomes, a combination that can reduce friction and strengthen performance.

• You can boost your impact in remote settings by setting clear expectations, choosing communication channels intentionally, and creating predictable rhythms that help your team stay aligned.

Discover best practices when managing remote teams and how remote team management software can help. Afterward, consider supporting your employees’ skill development with Coursera for Business, which enables you to build effective managers at every level through beginner- and advanced-level leadership content, including 40+ Skills Tracks to enhance leadership and other skills proficiency across the entire organization. 

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Why remote work benefits companies

Successfully juggling the demands of managing a remote team can provide a variety of benefits for your company. For example, remote work allows you to recruit top talent and increase your talent pool. Not only will you be a more attractive employer to potential employees, but you’ll also have access to skilled professionals worldwide. Your company can also save money on overhead by reducing energy costs and potentially downsizing its office space.

One potential benefit that remains up for debate is whether remote work leads to a more productive staff. Even well before the 2020 pandemic, studies suggested that workers might be more productive at home. New research may contradict earlier findings, suggesting that workers need to be in the office for optimal productivity. Although the results of this research may be muddy, the resulting dynamic between managers and their employees is clear: employees tend to believe remote work is more productive, and leaders often believe in-office work is more productive.

Managing remote teams: Best practices

Some common challenges of managing remote teams include the loss of direct supervision and collaboration with co-workers, feelings of isolation, breakdowns in communication, and fatigue from sitting in front of a video-conferencing screen all day. Using these tips may improve your remote team management skills and strategies, helping you better manage the challenges. 

Clearly define how and when you will communicate.

By establishing a clear understanding of when and how to communicate, you will help prevent disruptions. In an office setting, a lot of communication happens informally, such as when you bump into someone in the break room or happen to walk past their desk and remember to ask them a question. With a remote team, you’ll need to set team-wide expectations to minimize problems. For example, you may ask your employees to spend the last half hour of their day answering emails to ensure they answer any questions before the end of the day, or you could request that everyone is present for a virtual or in-person morning stand-up meeting. 

Choose communication channels carefully. 

You have many choices for the communication channels your team will use, such as email, video conferencing, messaging apps, workflow apps, and apps for collaborating regarding the communication channels your team will use, such as email, video conferencing, messaging apps, workflow apps, or apps where multiple people can collaborate on documents. All these tools can quickly overwhelm your employees and fill their work hours with inefficient communication. Streamline the methods for communicating with your staff to a few tools with a greater impact. Doing so will help your team spend less time managing their apps and more time focusing on their designated tasks. 

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Regularly check in with employees. 

Whether through a daily morning meeting or regular one-on-one, it’s essential to check in with your team regularly to stay connected on goals and objectives, get ahead of issues, and watch for signs of burnout or other distress.

A daily meeting can also help you manage expectations for communication, as your team will have a predictable moment to ask questions and report problems. You can also use daily meetings to foster authentic connections among your staff. On the other hand, one-on-one meetings are also an excellent way for you to connect with your team. In a more personal setting, you and your team may feel more open to discussing career growth and professional development opportunities. 

Be inclusive and consider others' schedules.

Having employees working in various time zones can be both an advantage and a disadvantage when managing remote teams. From your employee’s point of view, having more control over when and where they complete their work is an advantage of remote work. For you as an employer, remote work allows you the chance to work with a bigger talent pool over multiple time zones. The more you can structure your work and communication inclusively, the more you can take advantage of these benefits. 

Trust your team. 

When you don’t see your team completing their work, believing it’s getting done can be difficult. It’s important to stay connected with your team and lead them to the best outcomes, but if you check in with them too often, they might begin to feel you don't trust them to complete their work. Reinforce your confidence in your team by giving them the space to complete their work and trusting them until they give you a reason not to. 

Additionally, focusing on outcomes rather than tasks keeps attention on what actually moves the work forward. Consider dividing projects into smaller chunks so that you can better monitor progress with frequent deliverables.

Read more: Your Guide to Performance Management Process

Remote team management software

Remote team management software is a set of digital platforms that help distributed teams coordinate their work. By centralizing communication, project visibility, and workflow coordination, remote team management software keeps dispersed teams in sync. With platforms like Asana, teams can collaborate, track progress, and see who is doing what by when. This eliminates the need for everyone to be online at the same time. 

Three key advantages of remote team management platforms and software include:

1. Clarity of communication: Organized, centralized communication keeps teams in sync and minimizes the spread of messages.

2. Shared visibility: Teams gain from having unambiguous access to tasks, deadlines, and ownership, all on the same platform.

3. Asynchronous support: Even when schedules don't align, teams can still work together efficiently thanks to features such as automated updates, shared dashboards, and comments.

By lowering friction, outlining expectations, and providing workers with the framework they require to work together remotely, tools like Microsoft Teams, Trello, ClickUp, or Wrike can enhance the culture of your remote teams.

Unleash your business’s potential with Coursera

With Coursera for Business, you and your team will gain access to content from 350+ leading universities and industry partners to help you gain the requisite skills to grow and develop. Our customizable, scalable learning solutions balance workplace and technical skills training in diverse formats, from video clips to Guided Projects and Professional Certificates.

• See Coursera in action in our Demo Video 

• Hear Success Stories from other business leaders

• Discover the critical skills people need for today’s jobs with our Global Skills Report

You can train teams across your organization in the skills that matter most in the modern-day digital economy with Coursera.