How to make your virtual team work successfully in 2023

It won’t surprise us if your remote teams prove the hardest of all the teams you've had to manage. Let 2023 be the year things get easier. In this manager’s guide, we look at the common challenges remote teams face, what you can do to overcome them, and how to help your remote team thrive.

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What is a virtual team?

A team of individual employees and/or freelancers who work together remotely and communicate using digital methods. Virtual team members typically work from co-working spaces, remote offices, and/or home.

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Remote work is gaining popularity, with studies showing a 24% increase in remote workers from 2021 to 2022. This trend goes hand in hand with the increasing demand for effective remote leadership to keep teamwork online successful.

The 5 most common challenges remote teams face

If you want to increase your likelihood of remote working success in 2023, it’s good to know what you’re up against. Here’s a look at the most common challenges of virtual teams:

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Challenge 1: Remote communication

Let’s start with the most significant challenge when managing virtual teams: getting communication amongst your remote employees right. Research shows in-person body language significantly impacts how verbal communication is perceived, leaving virtual teams vulnerable to misunderstanding. Plus, remote teams also face logistical complications from conflicting time zones, such as communication delays and difficulties scheduling meetings.

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Challenge 2: Feelings of loneliness

One of the most obvious yet often overlooked challenges of working in a virtual team is the potential for employee loneliness. With remote workers left to work long stretches alone and no across-office chats to boost morale and build connection, well-being and productivity levels are likely to be impacted.

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Challenge 3: Struggles with team trust

Communication struggles and the inability to meet face-to-face can make building trust between team members much harder. For example, suppose employees don’t have a core understanding of each other and aren’t aware of what other team members are doing daily. In that case, they may be slow communicating, hesitant to delegate tasks, and struggle to give honest feedback.

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Challenge 4: Mismatched expectations

Without regular face-to-face contact, it’s easy to overlook setting clear expectations and keeping track of how employees are meeting these. Without clearly defined expectations (and guidance on how each member can meet these), remote teams will struggle to meet deadlines and solve problems effectively.

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Challenge 5: Delegation difficulties

Finally, one of the more complex challenges of virtual teams: getting delegation right (aka effectively assigning employees tasks). When you’re communicating remotely, it’s much easier to get crossed wires or accidentally forget to update individual team members than it would be when talking across an office or catching up in a quick in-person meeting. 

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6 Tips for managing virtual teams for high performance

Awareness of the biggest virtual team challenges isn’t enough. You’ll need to be proactive. Here are our 6 top tips for developing high-performing teams and ensuring employee retention:

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1. Prioritize virtual team building activities

Regular team building sessions online provide a wealth of benefits to remote teams, including:

1. Improved relationships
2. Increased trust
3. Better communication
4. Strengthened creativity and problem-solving
5. Greater productivity

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If your team building activities were only on your periphery, it’s time to shift them higher up your list of priorities.

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Gomada is an employee engagement solution that helps managers identify where to focus their time and measure team strengths and weaknesses before suggesting team activities to match. It has the added benefit of automated work team building scheduling, taking the effort of planning off the team lead. 

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For other ideas on team building, start with our favorite team building tips, high-performance team building activities, and how team building can benefit your company in 2022/2023?’.

2. Check your teams are well equipped

Don’t let a lack of tech be an obstacle between your employees and high work quality or productivity standards. You can’t always be on hand to check your workers have everything they need, so be proactive about investigating whether they have everything they need. And make sure teams know who and how to ask if there’s anything else they need from your organization.

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3. Nurture team communication and relationships

When it comes to building team bonds and supporting effective communication, team building sessions alone aren’t enough. Check company values and vision are understood by everyone, make sure the right communication tools are in place and see that employees know who to contact when they need help or want to give honest feedback. 

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For more on acing virtual team communication, read this article.

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4. Clarify expectations

Make your team expectations known to increase the likelihood of virtual team success. Things to think about include the following:

• What are team working hours?
• How should teams keep track of projects?
• What are the preferred modes of communication?
• What should employees do if they need help or want to give feedback?
• What are your company’s values and long-term goals?
• What are each of your employees' exact roles and tasks?

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5. Invest in the right management tools

Cut out wasted time on tasks that can be automated and keep a close eye on project workflow and employee performance with the right project management tools. These virtual employee engagement platforms provide a wide variety of tools to oversee all that your employees are doing.

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6. Pay attention to overall employee engagement 

Employee engagement relates to how committed, productive, and content your remote employees are. If you have disengaged remote employees, your whole virtual team is at risk of being negatively impacted, and you’ll want to do something about it urgently.

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Give these articles a read if you need further support understanding and increasing employee engagement: 

• Welcome to remote employee engagement: How to get started
• The ultimate employee engagement guide for managers
• Research-based team building activities for employee engagement
• 2022/2023 employee engagement statistics: trends, stats + charts

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4 Examples of successful virtual teams

If you needed any further convincing remote teams can be successful, here’s a look at four companies to learn from who are already getting it right:

1. Gitlab

As of 2022, Gitlab was the largest all-remote team in the world. With no company-owned offices anywhere on the planet and no one (not even execs) meeting in person daily. Gitlab is proud to have over 1,500 employees across 65 companies. Many employees travel the world frequently, taking their work wherever they go. 

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If anyone’s making a success of virtual teams, it’s an organization with their most recent quarterly revenue of $113.0 million (up 69% year-over-year) that relies on remote working alone! 

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How they’ve made remote teams work:

Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab, explains the key to effective remote teams is giving people agency, autonomy, and coaching to achieve their goals.

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2. Cisco

Ranked No.1 in the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, Cisco Systems made virtual teams a core part of its structure following the 2020 pandemic, allowing 75,000 employees to continue to work from home. The decision came after studying productivity levels during the 2020-21 lockdowns and finding productivity was not negatively impacted by employees working from home. 

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How they’ve made remote teams work:

With hybrid working at its core, priorities for Cisco’s work environment are the right digital tools for meetings and active collaboration that ties together shared information. This allows all employees to work together on specific problems and engage with customers and partners in a similar fashion.

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3. Salesforce

With one of the highest employee satisfaction rates of 2022, Salesforce is another organization proving virtual teams can be very effective. Since 2021, Salesforce has seen remote working thrive. They’ve hired more than 30,000 people remotely and had five consecutive quarters of growth. While 77% of their employees agreed they wanted in-person interactions, virtual teams are still very much part of the agenda for 2023 with their proposed ‘Flex Team Agreements’.

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How they’ve made remote teams work:

Salesforce has focused on making flexibility a company-wide value, ensuring it’s not seen as a privilege but an essential. Research and training are also prioritized to increase employee engagement for both in-house and at-home employees.

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4. Gomada

If we’re talking about successful virtual team examples, Gomada has to be on the list! While we may be relatively new on the block, here at Gomada, our team is distributed remotely across 6 countries. It’s part of the reason we’re so passionate about strengthening remote teams through our employee engagement solution.

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How we’ve made remote teams work:

Gomada has been fully remote from the start. We prioritize frequent and open communication alongside lots of documentation to keep the flow of information open. Most importantly, we always work on improving our team dynamics with regular team building sessions on our platform. 

The 5 types of must-have tools for virtual teamwork

1. Workflow tools - With the workflow and goal-setting tools, not only will you smooth out any delegation issues and keep an overview of team projects; you’ll keep your teams motivated! Take a look at our favorite platforms for the job.
2. Employee engagement software - Keep track of virtual team performance and send feedback surveys to find out what your remote teams think with employee engagement apps.
3. Digital communication tools - There are many ways to communicate with your virtual teams, depending on your team's needs (think video calls, emails, direct messaging, and push notifications). Do your research and ensure you’re using the best remote team communication tools for your organization.
4. Team building platforms - Whether investing in a dedicated team building platform that will schedule frequent team building sessions or a handy slack add-on that encourages team fun and games, the right tools are guaranteed to make team building easier. 
5. Team well-being apps - Employee well-being can easily go unchecked when managing a remote team. The reason? You don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes, and you don’t get the visual clues and incidental chat of an office environment. Kona is a great example of an app that helps you check in with remote employee well-being. And there are many other tools to help your teams improve wellness.