Let’s be honest, most of us are bad at managing. We often think walking around the office, chatting with employees and generally asking when projects will be completed are what constitutes management. We’re Michael Scott, stumbling into actually getting things done by happening to occasionally be in the right place at the right time.

This may have worked when your team was at the office and your presence could be counted on to keep things running smoothly. But now that team is scattered and you don’t have the same ability to wander and catch problems while they’re happening what do you do? How to you make sure your team keeps running smoothly when everyone is remote? How do you make sure everyone stays productive? Just how do you manage remotely?

If anything good comes from this rapid shift to remote work it will be this one change. The American workforce in general has always been focused on putting in the hours, often going so far to eat at their desks, or even skip lunch all together ( see Business Insider for some some seriously bad American work habits ). That’s what makes this the first and most challenging thing for managers to change.

As managers we need to stop thinking about how long people are working. It doesn’t matter any more (and quite honestly it never did). It’s counterproductive to the process of getting things done, you’re just noticing it now that your team is remote. Stretching out a task to take longer than it needs to doesn’t help anyone. The employee is bored and not engaged; and you’re frustrated because things are taking too long to get done. Instead focus on the results you want to see, not the time that’s being put in.

Productivity is different for every team inside of an organization. For a web developer, being productive may mean pushing two new features a week. For a sales team it may mean reaching out to three prospects a day with a relevant touchpoint. For a marketing group it may mean testing your landing page copy every four days.

As a manager it’s your job to set the definition of productive for your team and to make sure it’s been effectively communicated.

In the pre-remote work days you could casually walk by your team to check in. This helped not only to make sure things were moving forward, but it also gave an opportunity for them to let you know if they were having any problems with getting their work, done, or if they felt overwhelmed with a project, or a coworker, or life in general.

This touchpoint may be gone now, but thankfully it’s easily replaced.

Part of our process at Tanooki Labs is our daily standup meetings. Kept to 15–20 minutes these meetings are a key part of the new reality of over-communication. Check-ins with your team should be daily with everyone giving a quick status update. Check-ins with individuals ideally happen daily as well, but at the most should fall on an every-other-day schedule. This is the perfect time to communicate goals, timelines and feedback (both good and bad). It’s also a great time to just catch up and enjoy some one on one time with someone you’re not related to.

Just because you can’t walk around the office anymore doesn’t mean you can’t stumble into being a good manager. 

These three tips will only work if you do one additional thing, trust your team. Remote work is hard on teams at first. Individuals will have their attention pulled in a hundred different directions (pets need to be walked, kids need help with classwork, a pipe burst upstairs, etc) and they’re going to feel like they need to make a choice between work and home, which adds nothing but stress. But by effectively defining and communicating goals, shifting to an emphasis on getting things done (and not sitting at a desk 9 - 5), and allowing ample opportunity for communication, you can remove that stress. But only if you trust your team to get it done.