The Virtual Manager: Lead Productive Teams From Home

Name: The Virtual Manager: Lead Productive Teams From Home
Rating: 4.5 (2787 reviews)

Manage your remote team with empathy and intention to ensure employee productivity, connection, and success.

Created byShelley Osborne

Last updated 9/2020

English

What you'll learn

Adapt management best practices to an online environment
Lead a virtual team with empathy and understanding
Adjust communication norms to streamline the flow of information
Update meeting content and cadence for virtual platforms
Prioritize asynchronous work to optimize your team's time
Maintain connection and foster belonging throughout the remote employee lifecycle
Expand your feedback style for an online medium
Explore techniques for managing a hybrid (partly remote) team

Course content

5 sections • 18 lectures • 54m total length

Welcome to The Virtual Manager!2:17
Lead a remote team with empathy and intention to sustain connection in a virtual world. Explore productive practices for remote work and adapt management habits for long-term success.
Adjusting to Change5:01
Adjust to change in remote leadership by reframing perspectives, using PONT as a changing anchor, exploring five options, obstacle approach, ideal future, reverse brainstorming, and communicating across channels with feedback.

Empathy Best Practices5:51
Lead with empathy to build psychological safety in remote teams, listening and supporting wellbeing, while offering flexible schedules and compassionate handling of tech issues.
Supporting Employee Well-Being2:56
The virtual manager guides leaders to use the work from home canvas to assess physiological needs, connection, work structure, and growth, enabling structured well-being conversations.
Exercise: Fill Out Your Work From Home Canvas1:14
Fill out the work from home canvas using the attached template to identify sleep, boundaries, and schedules, overcome blockers, and discuss wellbeing with employees and your manager.

Set Communication Norms2:39
Define clear remote communication norms by setting expectations, embracing asynchronous feedback, and clarifying preferred channels and turnaround times to keep the team available and productive.
The Employee-Manager Workflow4:14
Lead remote teams by addressing the lack of face-time with clear progress updates and empathetic expectations. Use daily standups, regular check-ins, and documented updates to maintain visibility and productivity.
Document Everything1:28
Document everything to create a source of truth, especially remotely, by recording meetings with attendees, agenda, questions, and action items, and organizing norms, decisions, and faqs in a shared drive.
Prioritize Asynchronous Work3:24
Prioritize asynchronous work to reduce meeting fatigue by sharing information via email, group messages, and shared docs; use Google Suite tools and surveys for context, feedback, and decisions.
Be a Meeting Hero4:45
Decide if a meeting is truly necessary, default to asynchronous work when possible, invite only essential participants, and use the pao—purpose, agenda, and outcome—along with the meeting decision tool.
Exercise: Audit Your Calendar1:49
Audit your calendar in 20–30 minutes to schedule personal time, convert meetings to asynchronous work, reduce attendees, and include a PAO on invites for clearer, more productive time management.

Onboarding New Employees3:13
Onboard remote employees with proactive communication and a clear 90-day plan. Create onboarding buddy support and virtual meetups to boost functional and social integration.
Fostering Belonging3:05
Foster belonging by creating a safe, welcoming environment where every employee can share their authentic self and feel heard. Ensure psychological safety and equitable check-ins that invite all voices.
Giving Virtual Feedback2:46
Build a culture of feedback in remote teams by delivering regular, timely, video-based feedback that emphasizes specific situations, behaviors, and impacts with empathy to promote growth.
Maintaining Connection and Morale3:21
Foster connection and morale in remote teams through deliberate informal communication that promotes psychological safety via team meetings, one-on-ones, Slack sharing, celebrations, and fun virtual activities.
Managing Hybrid Teams4:06
Lead hybrid teams by keeping remote employees central, honoring time zones, and using asynchronous work, recorded meetings, and shared documents to ensure inclusion.

Thank you!1:50
Lead your virtual team with empathy and intent by embracing flexibility, prioritizing wellbeing, documenting decisions and processes, and fostering belonging through clear onboarding and open feedback, while prioritizing asynchronous work.
BONUS: Courses for Further Learning0:43
Explore free courses that deepen your understanding of remote work, change agility, fostering psychological safety and belonging, and feedback for virtual teams.

Requirements

You should have employees you directly manage for this course to be most helpful.

Description

Working from home can be difficult. Managing from home can be even trickier. Management requires tons of communication and collaboration with your team. So, what's the best approach to managing when you're all working remotely?

If you're a virtual manager, everything must be done with more intention and purpose. You can't just do what you normally do, except over Zoom. Managing from home requires re-examining your management practices and adapting your behaviors for a remote world. If you're able to pivot the way you and your team work from home, the more productive, connected, and successful you'll be.

I built this course for managers who are new to working remotely. Perhaps, like many (including myself!), you had to switch very quickly to working virtually, and didn't have the time or resources to plan what that would look like. I had to learn a lot (and I'm still learning) as I adapted to this new way of working and I think my team and I are better for it. In this course, I'd like to share the strategies, tips, and tools that have worked for us, including resources we developed for all of our Udemy employees.

In this course, you will:

Adapt management best practices to an online environment
Lead a virtual team with empathy and understanding
Adjust communication norms to streamline the flow of information
Update meeting content and cadence for virtual platforms
Prioritize asynchronous work to optimize your team's time
Maintain connection and foster belonging throughout the remote employee lifecycle
Expand your feedback style for an online medium
Explore techniques for managing a hybrid (partly remote) team

As you go through this course, I hope you find techniques that can help you solve some of the problems you're facing right now, and for the foreseeable future. Remote work may be here to stay - join me in this course to be the best virtual manager you can be!

Who this course is for:

Managers new to remote work who need to adapt their practices for a virtual work environment
HR/L&D professionals who need tips to support a virtual workforce

The Virtual Manager: Lead Productive Teams From Home

What you'll learn

Explore related topics

Course content

Introduction2 lectures • 7min

Lead With Empathy3 lectures • 10min

Empower Your Team's Productivity6 lectures • 18min

Manage With Intention5 lectures • 17min

Conclusion2 lectures • 3min

Requirements

Description

Who this course is for: