Rachel Andrea Go Fractional CMO for B2B eCommerce Companies

How to master remote performance management

Rachel Andrea Go /

The typical nine-to-five office job is no longer the norm.

In 2020, more than half (58.6%) of the total U.S. workforce worked remotely, with 41% working fully remote. This came after companies like Twitter and Square gave their employees the option to work from home forever.

In 2021, 70% of the U.S. workforce had worked remotely, with many still doing so and 90% saying they were as productive (or more) working from home.

Today in 2022, even as companies try to migrate back to offices, remote work remains one of the best company perks. Intuition found that 65% of survey respondents want to continue full-time remote work after the pandemic, and 46% of company leaders plan to allow their teams to stay remote.

While remote work arrangements benefit both employees and employers, they do present some unique obstacles. One study revealed 46% of managers see managing remote workers well as their primary challenge.

So, how does one master remote performance management? In this post, I’ll share some helpful techniques and tools you can use to make it work.

Common challenges of managing a remote team

A remote team requires plenty of trust to thrive, but building that trust is easier said than done. The truth is, there are many challenges that remote managers face, including…

Lack of in-person supervision

The sudden shift from seeing your team members every day to scheduled video calls can be jarring. You lose visibility on the specific projects your employees devote their time to, and if they’re working as efficiently as they could be. (Working remotely inevitably welcomes more distractions.)

Different work schedules

Employees can take certain liberties when it comes to remote work. Some may choose to roll out of bed and immediately get to work, while others may squeeze in a gym session or grocery trip in the middle of the day. Employees may also choose to take extra liberties when it comes to holiday time or trips, requiring you to establish clear guidelines.

Team members working in isolation

Some employees may not feel like part of the team as a result of working alone. They can’t interact with colleagues as much as they would in an office setting, where it’s easy to walk up to another person’s desk for a quick chat.

Difficulty getting a hold of someone

There’s always that one person who’s really bad at answering his or her messages. This can be a big problem when your main form of communication is email, Slack, or phone calls. You’ll need to set clear expectations so team members don’t neglect to check their messages, or to proactively keep the rest of the team informed.

Weak team bonds

Even if team members interact with one another during the work day, many conversations may solely focus on work, especially among team members who’ve never met in person. Lack of personal bonds between team members may dampen motivation in some employees or exacerbate issues with people working in silos.

How to successfully manage remote employees

Despite the challenges, there are plenty of steps you can take to promote a cohesive remote team. Here are several tips for keeping your employees productive and happy.

1) Share the big picture

What are the company’s overarching goals? How does each department contribute to them? How does each team support departmental goals?

If you want to keep your remote workers engaged and productive, they need to understand how their work fits into the overall business plan.

Get everyone on the same page

When working remotely, it’s vital that everyone feels like part of the team, because knowing their contributions matter increases employee happiness and productivity. You can achieve this in a few ways:

  • Hold quarterly town hall meetings. You can run an in-person or video meeting where you update everyone on company performance and company goals, then show them how each department fits into the big picture.
  • Run quarterly presentations with department heads. Ask various department heads to share their successes and failures for each quarter.
  • Schedule one-on-ones or small team huddles. Get together with your members over Google Meet and discuss how the project they’re working on furthers overall business goals.

How to plan and execute remote employee training programs

2) Establish clear individual goals

Aside from sharing your company goals for your entire team to rally around, remember to establish KPIs and milestones for each team member. Every employee should know what’s expected of him/her at the individual level so s/he can gauge and monitor personal performance.

Individual progress should be reinforced through regular performance reviews, as well as routine reporting. This helps to keep your employees on track and motivated to reach certain milestones (which are often associated with raises and/or progress towards a promotion).

3) Create a solid onboarding process

New employees can easily get lost in the mix when everyone is working in different places. This can lead to a bad experience — one in which your new hire feels unsure of how to get started with his/her new position.

Avoid this by assigning a clear point of contact for new hires alongside a process to properly onboard them. Make sure they’re equipped with your company history, organization chart, and other critical info that will help them do their job well.

How to implement online employee onboarding at your company

4) Offer equal promotion opportunities

If your company has both remote and on-site workers, it’s crucial to make sure remote employees have access to the same opportunities as everyone else.

This can get a little tricky due to the availability bias (our tendency to make decisions based on information that’s top-of-mind). In mixed teams, this bias can quickly turn into “presenteeism” — the phenomenon of promoting people who are seen in the office over those who work from home.

To overcome this, give everyone equal access to promotion opportunities and tell them what’s involved.

5) Communicate clearly and often

A successful team requires open communication between members. Whether meetings are scheduled or impromptu, all necessary members should be dialed in.

Have important conversations in a shared space

Using a company-wide shared messaging tool like Slack can open communication by housing all conversations in one place.

Slack is a great solution for performance management because you can create sub-channels for each project and invite team members to them. The channel is searchable, so everyone in your group will have access to relevant conversations. This prevents important communications from getting lost or buried.

Use screen-recording software for smoother communication

It’s not always easy to read someone’s tone in emails, and, despite our best efforts, messages can be misinterpreted. Sometimes, recording a video is easier and faster than writing a long message.

Encourage your team to adopt screen capture software like Loom and Vidyard to record quick messages about projects.

You can also use these tools to gauge your team’s recent work. Ask remote members to record a one- or two-minute video at the end of the day walking you through the work they did. To make this more fun, ask them to share their favorite part of the day and their most frustrating task. This will give you a better sense of what’s working, what isn’t, and how you can help.

Video conferencing

Video conferencing software simplifies remote meetings and helps your team stay connected. Use videos for weekly catch-up meetings, monthly training sessions, or regular project updates.

And, unlike in-person meetings, you can record, store, and share each meeting so people who couldn’t attend can watch later and benefit, too.

Take time zones into account

With team members spread across the globe, differing time zones can be a challenge. However, it can also be an asset, because it means you have a group working practically around the clock.

Let’s say your U.S.-based copywriter wraps up the copy for your latest promo at 11 p.m. PST on the 17th. Your Singapore-based designer can then work on it during their day and get it back to you the morning of the 18th. You can use tools like World Time Buddy to help everyone keep their hours straight.

6) Document everything

Transparency is imperative in a virtual team. You need to have procedures in place to ensure the group can locate crucial information when necessary, even if they weren’t part of the original conversation.

One of the most valuable aspects of remote work is the documentation of all communications. I recommend putting some guidelines into place to make these communications easily accessible.

Example guidelines:

  • Keep communication transparent. All critical work conversations should default to your project management tool. Avoid messaging apps like Viber and WhatsApp, because they are designed for personal use and it’s hard to track, share, and organize conversations for the rest of the team.
  • Detail project information in one place (for example, a Trello card description). Make sure all team members know where to check first when looking at a project. Avoid repeating yourself on different channels. Put all critical information into one place, and send anyone who asks questions (that have already been answered) there to get the whole picture.
  • Managers, train your team on where to find key information. Repeated appeals for your time inhibit your productivity. In an office, a question in passing isn’t a huge interruption. But when everyone is remote, it becomes a barrage of pings that can derail your workday.

The guidelines above will help keep communication crystal clear, while minimizing the time it takes to disseminate everything to a dispersed team.

7) Encourage team bonding

Performance management involves more than KPIs. If you want your group to stay focused and produce great work, everyone must feel included. Spending time together – even virtually – can significantly improve teamwork. You have a few options to accomplish this.

Experiment with virtual coworking days

The idea of a virtual coworking day is simple, but effective.

Here’s how it works: Choose one day to invite everyone to join a video call. Have everyone share what they’re going to work on, then, leaving your cameras on, mute your mics and work on your tasks. Come together for breaks and at the end of the session to share what you achieved.

Virtual coworking keeps employees accountable and motivated.

Plan virtual happy hours and other social events

Schedule more casual meet-ups in person or online. Some companies will designate certain days of the week to hold virtual luncheons, where employees spend an hour eating lunch together in small, virtual pods. Alternatively, you can host events like a mixology class, where employees receive supplies at their doorsteps and attend a fun class together.

Some virtual teambuilding activities include online minigames, virtual boardgames, virtual murder mysteries, online escape rooms, online workshops, virtual wine tastings, and more. The list goes on.

The opportunities are vast, but be sure to check with your team to confirm everyone is comfortable with the proposed activity. I recommend sending an anonymous survey with options, narrowing down to the top 3, then having your team vote on what they don’t want to do.

Recreate watercooler conversations

Foster more authentic conversations among employees through fun, non-work-related Slack channels or apps like Donut. The Donut app is a plugin for Slack that automatically pairs team members together and prompts one-on-one conversations in order to build camaraderie across your team.

Send team swag

Branded t-shirts, hats, and other swag serves multiple purposes: (1) it delights employees with free merch, and (2) it shows they’re part of a team. While the gesture may seem small, distributing team swag can unify your team (and even help out your marketing team).

You can use a corporate gifting service like Caroo, tap your favorite local suppliers (for example, the bakery downtown), or send out subscription boxes for a nice surprise.

8) Track team progress in a central location

You can track people’s progress through multiple means. I’m a fan of project tracking because it allows for greater autonomy, and it’s easier to match project deliverables to KPIs.

Use the same project management system for everyone in the company, whether they work on-site or remotely. Next, spend some time familiarizing everyone with the system so they know how to use it.

Choose the right project management tool

A project management tool makes it easy to break down projects into smaller, measurable chunks and assign them to individual team members. You can attach all necessary assets to the project brief inside your tool, add a deadline, and even discuss the project in the platform — perfect for remote performance management. Targets and KPIs for each deliverable should be clear so everyone knows what they’re working towards.

With so many resources out there, you can find something that fits almost any workflow. Tools like Wrike, Asana, Trello, Monday, or Airtable have their pros and cons, so choose one that most benefits your group.

How to be an effective remote PM

9) Celebrate success

Everyone needs to feel appreciated. Without external validation, your employees are prone to burn out or could emotionally detach from the work they contribute to your company.

Along those same lines, it’s important to give shoutouts to your employees in both individual and group settings. I’ve joined some team meetings where everyone, from the managers to new employees, was encouraged to thank another member in front of the rest of the team. Alternatively, they could mention a recent success story.

Through exercises like this, you can breed a culture of positivity, accountability, and gratitude.

How to run better employee performance reviews

Giving your team feedback, especially negative, can be daunting. You may want to skip employee performance reviews altogether, citing lack of time, or delay them until the last possible moment as the dread builds up.

Understandably so. It’s hard to maintain a balance between discussing what needs to be addressed, and not demoralizing your colleagues, while being mindful of the employer-employee power dynamic.

In the past, I shied away from giving my team constructive criticism. Instead of feedback, I would give them requests like, “Hey, can you do this instead?” without any context or reasoning why. Or, I would take the job they started and polish it off myself so they didn’t even know anything needed to be changed.

I’ve since learned the best results come from a place of understanding. Your team needs to know why they’re doing what they’re doing to be able to add their own unique insights and processes to their roles.

I’m a firm believer in hiring people who are smarter than you. As a manager, your only job then is to equip them with what they need to succeed.

Casual feedback vs. structured performance reviews

I’m a fan of fast feedback. It helps you course-correct immediately instead of following a formal process while the problem or misunderstanding compounds.

Fast feedback is more casual and should be integrated into your everyday work process.

Some examples of fast feedback include:

  • When a writer sends in a draft for review and you leave comments where needed in the Google Doc, then an overview (“Great work on this one, but I noticed…”) in the project management tool.
  • When your development agency misunderstands your request and you send a message in Slack or Jira to explain further (“Here’s a Loom video of what I meant. Can you share what I said in the ticket request that caused the confusion?”).
  • When you have a weekly sync where your design team presents their latest website wireframes and you give live feedback (“The purpose of this webpage is to…. Knowing that, I’m concerned this design is…”).

Although immediate feedback is important and has its place, it may not be enough to address larger issues.

The examples above could all be easily fixed within another work cycle however you choose to measure it — another draft, another sprint, another round of revisions, etc.

However, fast feedback isn’t enough.

Three main benefits of structured feedback

Structured feedback in the form of regular performance reviews can help in three big ways.

1) Surface and address large underlying issues

There are issues that are more pressing and will have an overarching effect on an individual’s quality of work as a whole, and likely the entire team performance.

For example, someone lacks a fundamental understanding of the company, product, or purpose and is unwilling to learn. Picture a product marketer who doesn’t understand their audience. This shortcoming will affect all of their work and lead to a trickle-down effect for everyone else whom their work impacts.

2) Optimize for compounding benefits

Alternatively, you could face issues that are the opposite — they’re minor enough to ignore day to day and project to project, but addressing them would have compounding effects. For example, you could save a few minutes each work cycle, documentation gets incrementally better, etc.

Say someone has a habit of leaving a Trello card in the wrong column despite repeated reminders. It hasn’t confused anyone to the point of mistakes yet, and it’s easy enough to fix yourself. This might be something you spend a few seconds adjusting daily, rather than half an hour discussing it with the team member responsible — but that half an hour of feedback (and possibly more training) could remove the task of fixing their Trello card placement from your busy to-do list.

Scheduled and structured employee performance reviews are useful to address larger issues that require a longer discussion, and to find opportunities to optimize your team and processes.

3) Recognize and reward your team

Finally, my favorite benefit of performance reviews is you can spotlight what your team is doing well. These are great opportunities to discuss promotions, raises, rewards, future career goals, and more.

Use your performance reviews to learn more about your employees and how you can help them get to where they want to be. Are they comfortable where they are as a cornerstone of your team? Do they want to be a star player that lands the big promotions? Are they interested in learning new skills or trying out different roles?

As a manager, you’re (hopefully) empowered to support your team in their goals. And I encourage you to take every opportunity to do so! It pays off — a happy and fulfilled team makes for a well-performing team.

Performance review and feedback cadence

I hate meetings.

A few years ago, I would have ended the article there. But I regretfully must admit, meetings do have merit, especially for managers.

A strong team has multiple communication touchpoints. I don’t advocate for daily standups, but I do find daily Slack updates useful. For example, I send a few clients a bullet list of updates in Slack a few times per week. They’re segmented into the following sections:

  • Updates/Done
  • Up next
  • For your review
  • Waiting on

Daily asynchronous communication is the answer to keeping a fast-moving startup on the same page and documenting all communications.

However, when it comes to virtual meetings, including longer employee performance reviews, I prefer the following cadence:

  • Weekly syncs with individual core team members
  • Bi-weekly syncs with contractors
  • Monthly check-ins with team members and contractors who operate well independently*
  • Monthly full-team check-ins
  • Quarterly team goal-setting
  • Quarterly team-building events
  • Semesterly manager feedback
  • Annual employee performance reviews

*I know someone is ready for this cadence when our regular syncs turn into updates from them, questions from me, answers from them, and no clarifications or adjustments are needed. Or, when our syncs don’t discuss anything new that we didn’t already cover in Slack.

To sum up, most companies conduct big performance reviews once a year.

I’ve also seen them occur at different intervals based on when someone joins a company (for example, at their three-month and one-year mark). The advantage of this is you don’t have to hold multiple reviews in the same month; you just have to keep track of when each team member’s review is coming up.

I’ve played with quarterly reviews for more recent feedback (although my quarterly client survey usually ends up being semesterly).

In the end, it comes down to what works for you and your team. The most important part is you do it regularly to keep the flywheel going.

Employee performance review best practices

Now let’s talk about the actual employee performance review and providing feedback. Here are some best practices that can facilitate smooth, successful, and stress-free reviews.

1) Give them the highlights beforehand

Write down your feedback, then give your employee a few days to sit with it and gather their responses and resources to bring to the review. At the very least, provide a bulleted list of what you’d like to discuss beforehand.

They shouldn’t be going into the meeting without knowing what to expect or how to prepare.

2) Kick off by setting expectations

In the review itself, set the stage and explain your motives, process, and desired results. This will help them relax at the beginning of the review, and ideally set them up to be more receptive to your subsequent feedback.

3) Clarify your motivation

Giving negative feedback isn’t meant to sabotage anyone’s career or give you an excuse to fire someone. It’s a tool to improve how you all work together as a team, which will help the individual as well.

Make this intent clear right from the start to put your team member at ease so they’ll listen more attentively instead of worrying about their job security. This also helps prevent them from becoming combative or defensive, because you clarify the benefits of feedback.

4) Set a time limit

Stick to one hour for your performance reviews. You get diminishing returns the longer you sit in a meeting going over the same things.

The concept of diminishing returns is that you get less ROI the longer sometime goes. For example, you can get 80% of your work done in the first 4 hours of work, and then slog through the remaining 20% in the last 4 hours of work.

If there’s more to discuss, or you weren’t able to finish your review, schedule another meeting after both parties have had some time to rest and process what was said.

5) End on a positive note

Although it’s important your negative feedback is heard and retained, your team members are more likely to remember their performance reviews positively if you close with encouragement, thanks to the peak-end rule in psychology.

I suggest sandwiching negative feedback between praise.

6) Track progress

Performance reviews are useless unless they actually contribute to improving performance. After each performance review, regularly check on the action items that came out of the meeting. At the beginning of your next review, open with highlights on how the items you discussed last time improved (or didn’t).

Performance review templates

I don’t want to give you a lot of advice without any idea of what execution looks like, so I’ve put together some templates and samples you can use to run more effective employee performance reviews.

Sample performance review script

Below, I’ve written a sample employee performance review script to kick off your reviews. Feel free to tweak this as you see fit. As you run more reviews with more employees, you’ll find your cadence and the wording you’re comfortable with.

Thanks again for your time today. First off, I want to set the scene for these feedback reviews and why we do them.

The purpose of this review is to improve our overall team performance, and to call out where any team member is struggling so we can figure out the best solution and course-correct.

The section on “misses” or things to improve will be more of a discussion, because it needs to be collaborative, not prescriptive, to be effective.

First, I’m going to share some things that concern me about your work and performance. Then, I’d like to hear your recap of what happened or is happening. I want to know who was involved, your thought process as things were happening, and the aftermath.

After that, we’ll brainstorm together about what I, you, and the rest of the team can do to better equip you for success so it doesn’t happen again.

Then, I’ll tell you what I plan to do moving forward, and you can let me know what you think. We’ll both come away from the conversation with action items and hopefully in our next review, this will be one of our success stories.

But first, I’m going to sandwich those harder discussions with some things you’ve been doing well. It’s good to start and end on a positive note to remind you how important your work is, and the impact you’re making.

Sample performance review feedback

Below, I’ve shared redacted quotes from a client performance review of mine. Instead of the full framework, I took a few examples of my strongest and weakest areas. This was shared prior to a virtual meeting where we went over each point.

Be Honest and Direct (10/10)

Rachel is great here as well. She is very honest and direct both internally with _____ and with our partners. She’s always willing to lend a helping hand (good example being _____) and is a true team player.

Be Curious (2/10)

This is currently the biggest challenge for Rachel, as she rarely dives into the “why”. A good example of this would be _____. She doesn’t often contribute new content ideas to the pipeline, and has not shown initiative to improve this. There are other areas where she has shown some curiosity, particularly in _____.

Content Marketing (10/10) 

Rachel has excelled in content marketing. We have an excellent editorial calendar and a very scalable system in place. Our content is relevant and interesting to sellers, and we have been able to acquire quite a few merchants through our content efforts. 

Product/Market Knowledge (5/10) 

Rachel has struggled the most here. Occasionally, on content where we dive in depth into the product, there are some inaccuracies. A good example would be on the _____. Another example would be on an article we wrote on _____. I believe this has also affected her ability to pitch new content ideas. I’d like to see her learn more about the _____ product and how it interfaces with the different pieces of software involved, as well as learn more about sellers and what the experience is like selling _____. 

Overall Metrics (19/20) 

_____ has finished with well over 1,000 newsletter subscribers, and engagement remains strong. The bounce rate has increased a bit, which is why I deducted a point here. 

Use this as inspiration for your own performance review metrics and framework.

Employee performance review tools

Ready to kick off your amazing employee review process? Here are a few tools that can help. I’ve personally used Lattice and 15five with my clients. The other tools in this list came from research and reviewing customer feedback.

Wrapping up — Enhance your remote performance management for engaged, happy employees who produce better work

How your employees feel about work — and you — affects their productivity. When someone feels they’re part of a team that cares about them, they’re more likely to work together towards common goals.

When isolation sets in, however, procrastination and resentment start to creep into the mix. That’s why it’s important to involve everyone and help them understand how their work affects the company. Remember: your team is made up of human beings, not cogs.

Published: January 16, 2019
Updated: March 13, 2020
Updated: August 23, 2021
Updated: March 14, 2022

Filed Under: Management, Remote Work