Managing a Remote Team: The Challenges and Solutions for MSPs

“A big part of what MSPs struggle with is trying to run inspiring, profitable businesses,” said Chris Day, CEO of Top Down Ventures, an early-stage investment firm focused on managed service providers (MSPs). “It's because it's a brute-force business.”

Day gave the following simple example.

As an MSP, if one of your clients has a broken computer, they’re going to call you up to fix it. You have to be able to accomplish that efficiently. If each time that client calls they end up speaking with someone new and the process for getting their computer fixed changes, they’re not going to have a great customer experience.

You have to be able to scale your business in a way that ensures you offer a consistently great experience while simultaneously generating enough revenue to support the level of staff you need to deliver that service.

“These are the key struggles for an MSP,” he said.

The start of 2020 and the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic completely altered the structure of the MSP work environment—as it did for most businesses that operate in knowledge work or otherwise. And as the movement toward dispersed and digital-first teamwork continues, MSPs are realizing their key struggles only intensify when they’re managing their teams remotely.

5 Key challenges MSPs face in managing remote teams

It’s difficult to see the full picture of what employees are doing in digital work environments, making it tough to control that critical end-client experience. It’s also a huge concern when you can’t really tell whether your people are feeling motivated and engaged in their day-to-day work.

With deep roots in the MSP space, we’ve been chatting a lot with owners, managers and employees at various levels to hear where pain is being felt most.

The following are some of the leading challenges MSPs are facing in trying to manage dispersed teams in the digital-first era—problems that need long-term solutions to support this new way of operating, for now and into the future.

If some (or all) of these sound a little too familiar then keep reading—we’ll dig into solutions as well.

1. Lack of team and organizational transparency

Successfully servicing clients is the highest objective for an MSP. So of course, the pain sets in when it becomes a challenge to ensure this is actually taking place.

They’re falling short when it comes to operational awareness.

What is operational awareness anyway?

It’s having full visibility, transparency and understanding around the operations and events taking place within your business. And it matters because without it, your teams and your MSP business are going to struggle with efficiency and consistently achieving successful outcomes.

A lack of team and organizational transparency ultimately results in this next challenge...

2. Continual digital distractions

When managers can’t see what their employees are doing, they have to ask. And when employees don’t have real-time visibility into the status of their teams’ projects, they need to go looking for answers.

All this lack of knowing leads to overly synchronous digital work environments. And when you’re continuously being pinged and video called—or you’re the one doing it—the team ends up losing a lot of time and potential for deep, strategic work.

Everyone is so busy trying to prove and manage productivity that they actually stop being productive.

3. Ineffective digital transformation

Every modern MSP team has its own stack of technology solutions—MSP software applications designed to facilitate and streamline work processes, from your RMM and your CRM, to your ticketing system and so on.

Employees often end up:

• using the tools available to create their own unique work patterns
• making use of the solutions they like and then simply tolerating or even ignoring the ones they don’t, and
• bouncing between tools to find the information they need and to collaborate with each other.

In the end, pricey SaaS subscriptions often go underused—or unused—for long periods of time without anyone taking notice. And creating more efficient and effective processes and procedures is only beneficial if everyone is on board and following them.

Of course, a lack of consistency hits MSPs where it matters most—clients.

4. Unclear client experience

There are so many moving pieces in a modern MSP that impact the client experience. But a huge struggle for MSP owners and managers is seeing precisely what that end-to-end experience looks like.

• How much time is being spent with each client? Is it too much time? Too little?
• Is the experience consistent?
• Is it efficient?
• Is it up to standard?

And for MSP employees, what’s the client experience workflow their fellow team members follow? How can the team share efficiencies and collectively rise to the most successful outcomes?

If your MSP business is waiting to hear NPS scores and survey results to understand your common client experience, that’s too late in the game. And it doesn’t help your team members be their best today.

5. Poor employee experience

The murky digital work environment with its pingy distractions and, at times, unclear processes and procedures, can leave employees with pains of their own.

Continually needing to update task boards, jump into status-update meetings and navigate multiple platforms to find answers to questions is not only unproductive, but also it can give rise to feelings of productivity anxiety.

All of this becomes even more pronounced when some employees are achieving much greater success than others. ‘What are they doing that I’m not?’

Especially in remote environments, employees can find it challenging to learn from one another and absorb effective working habits from their peers. Onboarding and learning management in general becomes more difficult, and the lack of structure can make employees feel unsupported.

When employees are unhappy and become unengaged, they become a flight risk. And, of course, losing amazing, talented people is the most painful challenge of all.

Solving the digital-first and remote team dilemma with openness and transparency

Overall, the biggest challenge for remote and digital-first MSP teams is that, whether they’re working together or apart, each team member is still working alone. Because there’s little transparency into what each person is doing and what the team is accomplishing collectively, a great deal of time and manual effort is getting wasted just on communicating the unknown.

We hear these challenges, and we’ve felt them ourselves.

The solution is to open up the digital work environment and eliminate all the unknown—to collectively lay it all out there and show every member of the team, regardless of title, exactly what’s being worked on and what output is being accomplished. And the key is to do it all automatically.

At Produce8, we’re changing that. We’ve built a platform that recognizes every application your team members use. We pull all the action and interaction data from these tools together into one central location, making it easy to have real-time visibility into the work being accomplished across your entire team.

• What does each individual’s work day look like?
• What does the team’s workday look like?
• And how can everyone evolve their work habits based on the data to increase efficiency and get to that output without all the manual input?

Because at the end of the day, the output is all that matters.

Join our beta program now for free and be among the first to create a more open and transparent digital work environment for you and your team with Produce8.

“We’re getting away from, ‘how many hours did you work’ and moving toward, ‘are you producing results’,'' said Day. “People are becoming more results-focused than time or task-focused, and I think that’s pretty exciting.”