You must trust your team. If you do not, no matter how many tips, books and articles you read or how many training courses you completed, the WFH journey will be a nightmare.

However there will always be people who need more direction, who struggle to change their mindset, who do not like communication with others or are easily distracted in the new environment i.e. home.

The following are areas that any manager overseeing a remote team should give attention to.

• Resource awareness. Ensure developers are not waiting on resources such as product owners, designers, business analysts or offshore teams. Automated testers who are not blocked by uncommitted code or user stories without acceptance tests. Tell your team to shout if they are struggling to get answers from other departments. Whereas before a developer could walk over to a designer or a database admin, now they have to send an email or Slack and wait for a reply. Inform the team of 'accepted' waiting times before they send a chaser. Setting a company wide 'virtual timeout' on communications will prevent people having unrealistic expectations of getting a response.
• Communication channels. Most teams working remotely will have virtual stand ups and a quick way of talking to another team member via collaboration tools or just a plain old phone call. You also need to consider people in your team who prefer face to face meetings and struggle to extract information from long emails or documents. How you present the information is important. Try to tailor it to each individual in your team. You should already know or will find out soon what works for whom. Talk to people who you think might be affected by the WFH change and ask them how you can make the transformation easier for them.
• Knowledge locations. Knowledge that is not documented needs to be, immediately. Everyone needs to know how to access it. For example, staff who are unsure how to access work networks should know where to find guides which inform them how to VPN into the network or RDP into their machine. Otherwise your people will initiate needless contact and at best wait for someone who is busy to stop and check their messages or at worst force them to context switch. The consequence is two people blocked from carrying out their duties.
• Communication overload. Having multiple message and email notifications popping up on a constant basis will create stress for your team who will struggle with the priorities. Ensure the team and wider company include request urgency in their messages and check with your team on what types of requests they received from other teams. Do the same for the internal requests. Analyse the data and look for any offenders who abuse the instant access to your team. In addition check if anyone inside the team is making too many requests. Perhaps they can be directed to a documentation repository where they can find answers on their own or send one email with all their questions which can be addressed in a separate dedicated call.
• Information flow. Staff is aware of virtual meetings taking place, decisions being made, features requested/denied/approved, availability of test environments, people on sickness leave, on holidays or priorities of others. You could easily find your developers implementing user stories that are not needed anymore. Update your digital boards as soon as you have new info and inform developers who are working on that part of the product. Do not expect people to constantly look at the boards. Programming is a focus game.

Controlling a remote team does not work. You can try it but soon neither you or your team will be productive. It will cause frustration, anger and apathy. Ensuring the team is armed with the correct, up to date information, together with the tools and knowledge allowing them to do their job will work. Gather metrics that give you an overall picture of the team's performance by talking to customers, reviewing KPIs and ensuring the product quality does not suffer. Check on the mental health of each team member. Look out for any pain points you can address for your team. You can find them by asking the right questions, observing chatter and emergence of issues not seen before.

Every team that is suddenly forced to work remotely will be challenged in the beginning. It is to be expected. A good manager will recognise this, look for ways to improve the situation, motivate the team, understand various family commitments, become comfortable with less control and more comfortable with collaboration tools. With the positive and open mindset a team not used to remote working can be a successful and productive team.