How to Scale a Remote Team Using These 5 Cloud Hacks

When you’re able to effectively train and delegate, you’ll set yourself up for success in the healthiest and sustainable ways.

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This is a challenge at any job but becomes even more challenging when you’re working to build and scale a team in a remote context.

If you’d like to tackle the challenge of scaling a remote team, cloud solutions and services, and the right software will be your friends.

Here are five hacks that will ramp up your growth.

1. Train Others to Do Parts of Your Job

Take an honest look at the tasks in front of you.

Chances are you are overworking yourself as the leader of the company.

When you’re overworked, you make mistakes you otherwise wouldn’t and it takes longer to finish up things that really matter.

Examine which tasks you can begin taking off of your plate. Identify the tasks that don’t require too much thought – they’re considered busy work. Take those tasks off of your plate first.

As you reassign different tasks to other people, explain the right way to do them.

• Use cloud services to share documents and guidelines for specific tasks and make sure they know they can access these for reference whenever they need.
• Share the passcodes and usernames for specific accounts where you’d like someone else to come in and take over, but also make sure you have the right security measures in place.

As you put others in charge of more parts of the company, you must let go of your desire to control.

The golden rule to follow is: “As long as they do the job right and on time, the rest doesn’t matter.”

2. Create Systems to Train New Employees

When you’re bringing new employees on board, getting a hang of everything can be a steep learning curve.

The hardest part with new employees still learning stuff is resisting the temptation to micromanage or take the foreseeable shortcut that involves doing it yourself.

Instead, trust that they will learn and take active steps to help them learn.

Create an online course system that teaches new employees how to work within the company context.

• Keep your courses on company operations in cloud storage so new hires can access and watch/read them whenever they feel like it.
• Make sure they are available via any device your new hires might use – computer, phone, tablet.

When you’re this thorough, you’ll do a better job of covering all of your bases as cloud services can really help with business management.

Pay attention to the questions new hires ask after they’ve gone through the online training courses.

Whether you find a trend within the questions or receive unique questions that haven’t been answered, write them down.

These are good indicators on what you need to explain more thoroughly/or simplify as you scale and hire new people.

3. Solidify a Way to Efficiently Share Files

Working on remote projects always comes with issues involves file-sharing.

Whether you’re trying to send a large video file or high-resolution graphics, it’s always important to make sure that the quality of the file doesn’t get compromised in transit.

It’s impossible to send large files through an email without using efficient cloud services like Google Docs or Dropbox.

If you plan on using these types of services and have plans to scale your team, never forget to create adequate space for your team members.

Using the free offer on services like Dropbox will get you in trouble quickly as employees are producing work and sharing files on a daily basis.

It’s worth the investment to pay for as much as you can get for a team that is intentionally scaling its capacity.

Alternatively, there are cloud service companies that allow you to increase or decrease your access based on how much you and your team use particular services.

If your employees struggle with sharing and accessing files, this will directly impact their ability to maintain productive workflow, so invest in them so they can be efficient.

4. Find Task Management Solutions

Task management software is godsent for remote teams.

You can assign and rearrange tasks, see workflow, identify issues and resolve them quickly.

It’s a central hub of all the activities your team does, and everyone can see what’s happening with a single glance thanks to good visuals and color-coding.

While certain changes can only be made by certain people, everyone should be included.

As a team member completes a task, they can cross the item off of the list, which can trigger emails or notifications for others who were waiting for them to finish.

Keep in mind that if you’ve delegated and built teams, you don’t need to be the one who sees every single completed task – only those that are important to you.

5. Schedule Regular Meetings

One of the main reasons people seem to view remote work negatively is because there’s no real connection between headquarters and everyone dispersed around the globe.

At least, not without some effort.

Therefore, it’s great to host regularly scheduled video conferences – this will save you time since you’ll update everyone and it will show that you are indeed a living, breathing person.

As your company grows, find VoIP services that can support everyone without breaking up, losing connection or having abysmal video quality.

• Make sure you’re always in control of those meetings – the more people on the conference call, the easier it can descent into chaos.
• Structure the meeting well and give them a quick summary of what you’ll talk about before you begin.
• Have some time scheduled for questions, feedback, and conversation too.
• It’s also wise to make sure these meetings are mandatory. If your employees are in a different time zone, be considerate of that factor. You might need to schedule two or three instead of a single meeting to cover all time zones.

Moving Forward with The Scaling Process

There are many people who are enamored by the idea of leadership but don’t fully understand all it entails. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a manager within your region, it’s essential to lead people well because your success relies on it.

Keep in mind that leading means you know when to let go – remote workers should be independent, you just need to provide the structure to boost that independence to the highest level.

FAQs, meetings, onboarding procedures, guidelines, and documents will help you achieve that goal.

You will probably make a few mistakes along the way, but once all these procedures and cloud solutions are in place, you will be able to scale up and down without hiccups.