AJ Agrawal — July 20, 2017 As part of an increasingly globalized world, companies are taking advantage of robust communications networks to gain an advantage over their competition. According to a report by the New York Times, 43% of employed Americans spent at least some time working remotely in 2016. This trend towards remote work should arouse the curiosity of any business owner seeking to optimize a workforce’s productivity.
Building a remote team has a number of benefits and drawbacks. If your business is trying to create a remote team, then it’s important for you to evaluate exactly what you stand to gain and make attempts to mitigate the drawbacks. For instance, a remote team allows you to leverage talent from a global pool and may allow you to save significantly if you’re outsourcing that work to a domestic or international company.
However, remote teams are also prone to communications issues and a number of other factors that contribute to subpar performance and work results. Attempting to integrate the efforts of a remote team with an in-house team may also create a number of cost inefficiencies. Let’s walk through some common strategies that you can employ to get the most productivity returns out of remote work while reducing lapses in work quality or communication.
- Keep a Proportion of Remote Workers Local
Research has shown that the most productive types of remote workers are those that can still come into actual physical office of the company, but spend a majority of their time remotely. For example, polls by Gallup suggest that workers that spend 60 to 80 percent of the their time working remotely are the most productive and engaged when it comes to their job. The idea here is that workers get the best of both worlds in terms of communication and being able to work at their own pace remotely.
- Open a Communication Channel Between Local and Remote Teams
It’s important to be include your remote team members as part of the onboarding process – 86% of new hires formulate their decision to stay or leave within the first six months. Your remote team should be aware of the initiatives that your local team is taking and vice versa. A familiarity between remote teams and on-site teams will help foster an increased degree of uniformity in the expectations of work produced by both teams.
- Schedule One-on-One Meetings With Remote Team Members
While you don’t want to encroach too much and micromanage the work of your remote employees, it is important that you maintain a regular relationship with your remote team members. Setting up one-on-one meetings encourages social participation in your remote workers and gives you a way to check up on their current performance and mood at the same time.
- Keep an Eye Out For Overwork
You might think that a remote position gives employees more opportunities to slack off, however, the opposite is sometimes true. While productivity can suffer as a result of remote workers not putting in the necessary hours, productivity loss from burn out is also a very real risk that you should observe. Entrepreneurs Jason Fried and David Hansson explain in their book Remote: Office Not Required that making sure that your remote employees get enough rest and time to themselves is an important consideration if you want them to be productive in the long run.
- Make Communications Readily Accessible
This principle should go both ways. Your employees should be able to contact you when they feel the need to and you should be able to easily get in contact with your employees as well. A variety of softwares such as Slack or SAP SuccessFactors offer vital communications tools and HR infrastructures to provide a medium for easy and reliable communication.
- Introduce a Sense of Workplace Culture
Creating a sense of belonging and community is another key step towards the successful integration and long-term effectiveness of a remote team. Conveying a sense of workplace culture online can be difficult, but it’s not impossible if you use the right tools to allow for expressions of individuality and personality to take place.
- Offer and Encourage Cross-Team Collaborative Efforts
Assuming your remote team isn’t completely specialized to handle one task, it’s possible to strengthen integration by promoting cross-team collaboration efforts. What this means is that you should help provide opportunities that allow your local team to share and work on problems together with remote team members. Nifty tools like Lightshot or MangoApps can help simplify the processes relevant to this sharing effort and guide smooth team interactions.
- Set Clear Communication Guidelines and Expectations During Onboarding
First impressions are very important to the subsequent behavior and actions of your employees. If your remote employees know that there are clear communications guidelines and expectations from the very beginning of their work, they will be more likely to participate in the workplace and community. Establishing a sense of what’s normal and expected goes a long way to helping remote employees situate themselves in a business.
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