For our industry, engaging your remote team of coaches and instructors is arguably one of the most important strategies moving into the new year.
At a time where team contact is still restricted for the foreseeable future, your customers will be seeing and possibly even speaking to your team more than you.
Engaging your very valuable delivery team needs to be a top priority to ensure not only are they motivated, but they are informed and supported to ensure your customers are receiving the best quality and consistent delivery from your team.
In our guide, we share some key strategies and road map for a productive, engaged team to improve retention, performance, and promote communication and a people-centric culture within your company.
The Challenge
Within our industry dealing with the challenge of remote working has been the norm. You may already have implemented strategies to ensure your team feels connected to your brand, the wider team, and supported by their managers.
Now, however, a new layer of restrictions has been put in place which for the foreseeable has removed the opportunity for group contact and connection.
Moving into the new term, you may now experience your team feeling increasingly isolated and/or disconnected from the company and vision, find it difficult to motivate themselves, reduce their communication with your extended team, not ask for help when they need it, and worse senior team members may have lost their opportunity to maintain consistency in the experience your customers are receiving.
Key steps to engaging a remote team
1. Adopt the technology required to connect your company with your people
Technology is the future for remote connection, there is a wide offer of tools to consider to really connect your people to your company and each other.
Not only that, your delivery team will better perform at their jobs if they have access to the tools they need, while out on the field. Below are some ideas to consider:
- Meetings, Training & Workshops – Miro and Mural are both great tools to support your team’s continuing connection during internal meetings, training sessions, and workshops allowing for contribution and collaboration from everyone.
- Team chat – for informal discussion and or quick answers, Slack is a great tool to encourage regular communication with channels to ensure conversations happen in the right place.
- Collaboration and Projects – Monday.com provides a great place to give your team oversight and clarity on projects and help achieve deadlines.
- Online CRM – Coordinate Sport was built for the industry and provides one platform with tools and functions designed to coordinate your coaching and instruction business. All our features and functions are connected to the data you input. Decisions, changes, and communication within your team become painless.
2. Refine your onboarding process
Onboarding your team correctly should be a guide on its own. Outlined below, we have listed key areas you should include in your onboarding of your team to ensure they feel connected and supported to perform in their new role.
- Information about your Company, brand, vision, mission, values, culture, and services.
- Who’s who and how to connect.
- Set the Expectations – What is the scope of their role? What should be their focus? Targets, expectations of them, their responsibilities, and key duties.
- Communication – Meeting schedules and channels for communication.
- Development – Support and training/learning opportunities, set 1, 3, and 6-month review meets.
3. Implement quality and development observations within your teams.
Regular observations at least once a term is a great way to give feedback, share best practices, identify development opportunities, maintain consistency in your customers’ experience, and meet your team members one to one. This strategy promotes better coaches who feel valued and happier customers.
4. Regular communication
As well as showing you value your team and improve contact for remote deliverers, being proactive with regular contact gives managers better insights into their team and individual performance.
A great rule of thumb would be to:
- Conduct bi-weekly check-ins – informal chats.
- 6 month and Annual performance reviews. Set the objectives, training needs, and development pathway annually and review the progress after 6 months.
- Staff Surveys.
5. Opportunities for regular group training and meetings
Even in the current climate, there are tools available to support remote group training. Your team will thrive in workshop environments and feel included when provided with the opportunity to contribute ideas and better understand the expectations of them.
6. Access to delivery resources and tools
The importance of the right tools and access is sometimes overlooked, or companies haven’t found the right solution. The benefits for both the company and team to feel connected are impactful for any coaching or instruction business.
Coordinate Sport allows for remote login by your delivery team and gives them remote access to everything they need to deliver their role to the best of their ability.
