The remote work revolution began even before the pandemic. A significant reason for this massive uptick is because of remote work’s ability to help organisations find top-tier talents and reduce costs.
Forbes reports that hiring remote employees allows businesses to save $22,000 on operational expenses annually.
However, building remote teams has a few challenges that every organisation must understand to succeed. As a leader, you’ll need to create the right conditions and use best practices to ensure your remote teams are productive and efficient.
In this article, we’ll outline how managing remote teams best practices can help leaders build competitive remote teams.
1. Create an Organisational Structure
Nailing down a tight company structure for your remote organisation is crucial, especially since you are coordinating with teams spread on different time zones and continents. With the right company structure, remote teams will understand where to ask for help or answers for specific issues. It also provides you with a comprehensive guide in supervising daily employee tasks, interactions, and reporting.
When creating an organisational structure, you must consider short-term and long-term business goals. After all, this structure will also serve as the blueprint for how you will achieve your company vision. You should also define roles and the framework around which your business operates and stick with those definitions to avoid conflicts that could shut down your operations.
2. Define your Ideal Remote Employee
One of the remote work best practices 2021 is to consider the skills it takes for a candidate to be successful in your industry. A good remote employee should not only be a good fit for the job but also have exceptional communication skills and can respond quickly.
After all, you can’t afford to spend the work day going after remote employees when you need immediate answers and information. By defining your ideal remote worker, you can evaluate and measure their qualifications effectively, improving the odds of hiring the right candidate. This also helps you craft a comprehensive description of jobs with online degrees that can attract quality candidates when you’re hiring to enhance your talent pool
3. Establish Communication Guidelines
Communication is the most critical ingredient of a successful remote team. Unlike traditional teams, remote teams have different requirements, expectations, and challenges. As a leader, you need to understand the challenges and nuances of communicating effectively in a remote work setting.
Therefore, establishing communication guidelines for remote teams is essential in ensuring that they can collaborate effectively. Ideally, you must decide on the appropriate time for communication, expected response times, and the tools to use to communicate with multiple departments. By setting communication guidelines, you can ensure each employee can respond immediately to your questions and, thus, allow for a more productive and efficient working environment.
4. Provide the Tools They Need to Be Successful
Achieving success in a remote work setting is all about providing employees the right tools to stay connected and productive. Without the right tools, organisations run the risk of their employees failing to deliver the amount of productive work expected from them. This can ultimately hamper business processes and create unwanted challenges of managing remote employees.
On the flip side, providing your remote teams the right tools and resources enables them to fast-track work processes, minimize re-work, and ensure successful task completion. It also allows you to train remote workers on how to do their tasks more efficiently, resulting in reduced back-and-forths and increased worker satisfaction. The right tools will also help remote teams increase collaborative productivity, which is crucial in adapting to changing work environments.
5. Make Employees Feel They Are Supported
As you start building your remote work organisation, it is important to make employees feel supported from the get-go. Unlike a traditional work setting, remote work can result in feelings of isolation and loneliness. A Forbes report shows that 19% of remote workers indicate loneliness as the main issue of working from home.
One way of the remote teams best practices is to make employees feel included by creating an environment where they can share their opinions and communicate freely with the management. You can do this by conducting purpose-built video interviews with remote teams to keep them engaged and motivated.
By supporting remote employees right from the start, you can prevent inconsistent work practices and miscommunications while maximising the full advantages that come with transitioning to remote work and hiring global employees.
Building Global Remote Teams Successfully
Establishing a successful remote organisation takes planning and perhaps powerful software tools such as Willo to find the right employee.
Willo is a one-way video interview software platform designed to help remote organisations discover talented people and form an agile remote work organisation. To learn more, you can browse our website to check out our features or get in touch for specific inquiries.