There are a number of things that can make managing distributed teams easier and more successful. These include communicating clearly, building trust between team members, setting clear expectations, and finding effective ways to manage employees who work in different locations and time zones.
As remote and distributed work continues to shape global employment trends, understanding how to manage remote teams effectively is more important than ever. According to a 2024 white paper by the World Economic Forum, digital jobs and remote roles are expected to grow significantly, reshaping how teams collaborate across borders.
What Are Distributed Teams?
A distributed team is a work team that is based in different geographic locations, aside from the main offices and company buildings.
Some employees, for example, might be physically based in the main office and warehouse and other company locations.
Other employees, though, might work virtually from different corners of the world.
So, as a manager, you might be working from the head office in Manchester, England, but then have staff you manage in Delhi (India), NYC (USA), Paris (France), and even a member of staff who might be working as a digital nomad from Costa Rica.
Distributed teams are one form of virtual team. If you want to compare different team structures, see our guide to the 8 types of virtual teams.
The Challenges of Managing a Distributed Team
So what are the challenges with managing distributed teams, and how can we use agile methods for managing these employees?
Advantages of Distributed Teams
There are definite advantages to having distributed teams, and these include:
- Ability to hire the best person for the job regardless of where they live in the world.
- Possibility to offer better working conditions for staff in terms of more freedom and flexibility.
- Chance to have staff from different backgrounds, cultures, and countries and, as a result, to have a diverse workforce with a greater range of ideas, skills, and knowledge.
- Opportunity as a business to reduce costs via savings from office space, utility bills, and sometimes more affordable staff from another country (although the latter can raise ethical considerations regarding labor costs).
Having mentioned the advantages above, there are, of course, challenges surrounding distributed teams, especially in respect of how you manage these teams.
Disadvantages of Distributed Teams
Typical issues include having to manage staff who:
- work in different time zones and so are available at different times for group meetings
- have varying ways of working and communicating because of their culture
- are harder to sometimes track in terms of their work hours and workload
Let’s take a look then at some useful tips and solutions for managing distributed teams!
8 Tips for Managing Distributed Teams
1. Provide Intercultural Communication Training to Your Virtual Team
As I’ve mentioned above, cross-cultural communication strategies are important for managing a distributed team in order to improve and maintain productivity and to have a team that works well together.
Employees in distributed teams naturally live in different countries and are often from differing cultures and have different ways of working.
For this reason, it is worth ensuring that staff understand the following, for example:
- How culture shock, culture clash, stereotypes, and prejudices can impact how to communicate online
- Cultural value dimensions
- Ways of improving cross-cultural communication in the workplace
2. Train Managers to Manage Distributed Teams
One of the first things I recommend is to provide training for your managers on how to manage virtual teams.
The way to manage a distributed team on a daily and regular basis is naturally going to be virtual, i.e., online.
Learning virtual team management techniques is not something that comes naturally to many of us managers, as this is a relatively new expectation for us.
Developing strong virtual leadership skills is vital in today’s remote-first environment.
There are methods and techniques for being a good virtual manager, and we cover this in the ‘Managing Virtual Teams’ courseware.
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3. Cultural Exchanges Between Team Members
Most distributed teams tend to include employees from various cultural backgrounds.
This cultural diversity can be a great thing, as discussed earlier regarding the advantages of distributed teams (i.e., a greater range of ideas and input).
A benefit is also the chance for each of us in a distributed team to learn about other cultures, other countries, and to get insight into places and people from around the world.
Building on this amazing cultural diversity, an idea that I recommend is to have a different employee or two present to the other members of the team every so often.
The presentation only needs to be 5 minutes, for example, and can include:
- Overview of their job role and what they do
- A little about their town/city and where they live, including any traditions and anything interesting
- A little about out-of-work interests
Organizing in a way that is fairly casual but that provides staff with an easy way to get to know each other virtually, especially where staff have never met in person, is a great way to build a bond between the team.
4. Regular Team Meetings Online and One-To-Ones
Regular communication is key to managing a distributed team, helping to:
- Foster a sense of belonging
- Ensure alignment on team goals
- Provide a platform for cultural exchange presentations (see Tip 3)
- Create a sense of routine
- Allow you, as the manager, to project ideas just as you would in an in-person team meeting.
Whether meetings take place daily or weekly will depend on your business needs.
Time zones inevitably can become a challenge. One effective way to manage this is by encouraging a mix of real-time sessions and asynchronous communication, enabling team members to contribute at times that suit their local schedules.
Try to schedule any essential live meetings during windows of timezone overlap, even if brief, to ensure broad participation.
You can find more tips for managing staff across time zones here.
Don’t forget to hold regular one-to-one check-ins with each team member, too—these are just as important as group meetings!
5. Virtual Onboarding and Mentoring for New Employees in the Team
One group that can often be the victims of virtual and distributed teams is those who join the work team as new employees.
You cannot, in this case, organize for the new staff member to be given a tour of the building and to be personally introduced to other staff in person.
Given that the retention rate of new employees can be 45% higher if an effective onboarding (known as ‘Induction Training’ in the UK) process is in place, it is essential that even when new staff are geographically distant from other staff, onboarding is still given serious consideration.
If you are interested in onboarding in general, take a look at the onboarding for new employees post.
6. Learn as a Manager How to Trust Staff Who WFA or WFH
If you are managing a distributed team, one of the most difficult things can be learning to trust staff that you cannot physically see in person and manage in the traditional manner.
Learning to trust your team and learning delegation skills are invaluable in understanding how to manage a distributed team.
I recommend using one of the employee monitoring tools or productivity platforms designed for managing distributed teams that work remotely. Some of my favorites are:
- Time Doctor – one of the leading tools for managing remote staff, and fairly easy to use and does the job perfectly.
- Slack – is also a great tool for managing the productivity of your remote team
Try to develop trust and delegate tasks effectively.
If workloads are met, then you might want to embrace some level of flexibility for the employee in question.
7. Ensure Your Team Has the Tools They Need (Use a Checklist)
Being proactive in terms of ensuring that each person in the distributed team has all of the tools that they need is essential.
Working from different countries, and cultures and in different environments, each employee will have a unique situation.
For some employees, for example, they will be familiar with ergonomics and understand how to avoid backache and other ailments by sitting correctly at their desk.
Along with ergonomics and how people manage their posture and seating position when working from home, it is worth working to ensure that your team also has everything they need to do their job effectively.
One example is to ensure that they are using the right antivirus and security software on the device they are using for work.
I recommend preparing a checklist and ensuring that every employee working within a distributed team is checked against the list twice a year.
8. Use Virtual Training Activities in Online Meetings & Training
There are activities and games that work very well in virtual and online classrooms and meeting rooms for employee engagement online.
>> I recommend taking a look at the 21 fun virtual training activities that we have added to the free training games and activities section
I’ve designed the virtual training activities and games to work for managing distributed teams, i.e., for use in virtual meetings or for virtual training.
More Remote Teams Resources
If you found this post on managing distributed teams useful, we recommend exploring our full Managing Remote Teams hub. It offers deeper insights into remote leadership, collaboration tools, and team communication best practices.
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