Going fully remote may be one of the best things you can do for your business in these turbulent times. Employees working from home enjoy the improved work/life balance, spending more time with their loved ones instead of being stuck in traffic jams on their way to the office. When you add increased flexibility and lower expenses to this equation, you’ll get the perfect work model to keep your business thriving. However, even the most efficient solutions come with different challenges you need to overcome to make things work.
This said numerous entrepreneurs need to face and overcome various logistic challenges related to productivity, communication, and company culture, once they decide to start working remotely.
For this reason, we decided to offer you several tips that will help you manage remote teams from day one, ensuring seamless communication and enhanced productivity while focusing on the company’s core values.
Update Your Infrastructure
Shifting your business from the physical to the virtual world is a demanding task that requires time, effort, and attention to detail. You may have already digitized specific sections of your business, like accounting or customer service. However, numerous other things vital for your business, like time tracking, performance evaluation, quality control, and onboarding processes need to be fully optimized to work flawlessly in the digital work environment.
This is why you need to seek assistance from advanced technological solutions like project management platforms or time tracking tools. If you want to find how a quality time and productivity tracker can boost your business, click here and find the solution that best suits your needs.
By optimizing and digitizing your infrastructure, you’ll save money and gain invaluable insight into your workflow that’ll help your business grow.
HR Teams Should Document Everything
This is a significant step towards building a successful remote team. Now that millions of people have become aware of the numerous benefits remote work offers, we can expect the remote workforce to grow and dominate the future job market. This is why people in charge of finding, hiring, and retaining employees need to create well-devised and documented systems and policies for the next generation workforce to use and build on.
So if you have just started running a remote team, you can start by outlining main job responsibilities, asking your new employees to expand this list as new tasks appear. As time goes by and team members get more comfortable in their roles, team up with them to create easy-to-follow guidelines that will help onboarding employees learn the ropes and faster and fit in their roles.
Offer your Team More Structure
We live in challenging times where life circumstances are constantly changing adding more pressure to already stressed-out employees. For this reason, you need to provide much-needed structure and stability to your remote team members so that they can relax and focus on reaching set goals.
Namely, if you want to create a stress-free working environment and boost your team productivity make sure to set clear goals and keep communication channels open. Creating an efficient communication policy may be the first step towards a more structured workplace, where you will determine communication channels for discussing significant issues or business decisions, giving feedback, and socializing with co-workers. In this way, you’ll foster a culture built on honesty, trust, and appreciation.
Focus on Relationships
One of the major challenges managers need to tackle if they want to turn their remote workers into close-knit teams is the lack of social interactions. This negative side of remote work may make people feel isolated and lonely, affecting their health and their performance. For this reason, it is crucial to lead with empathy and focus on building relationships. You’ll achieve this by listening to their needs, addressing burning issues on the spot, and encouraging social interactions via Zoom or other platforms whenever possible.
In short, the remote work model is here to stay. Even if you decide to get back to the office one day, things will never be the same. So this is the right time to jump on this bandwagon and make adjustments to build strong and successful remote teams.
