4 Quick Tips to be a Better Remote Manager

Ben Lobaugh
4 min readNov 4, 2022
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

Recent events have forced a lot of businesses and teams to work from home, many for the very first time. If you are leading one of these teams and you have never worked remotely before, you are probably realizing you’re going to need to make some adjustments, most importantly to your communication.

Clear Communication

Hopefully, you have already been putting thought into the way you communicate and how that will be received by your team. As your team transitions into working from home, the value of clear, deliberate communication becomes even more crucial, especially over text communication like Slack or email.

In an office setting, people can easily take things you say in a larger context, that includes your tone, your demeanor, and a ton of other factors. Remote work strips most of that context away. The sarcasm you think is obvious in your Slack message may not be so obvious to the person you send it to. Before you send anything, try to think about all the ways it could be interpreted by the recipient, and if you could make your message easier to interpret and understand. While it’s useful to ask your team to try to assume the best intent when reading messages from each other, YOU are responsible for doing everything possible to make your communication as clear as it can be.

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Ben Lobaugh

Director of Engineering at Mindsize. 20+ year technology veteran. Providing leadership insights, mentorship, and coaching to new and existing leaders.