Managing remote employees effectively

Challenges of remote workers

The pitfalls of including remote workers on your team can make you think twice about offering a flexible workplace. If not done properly, managing remote teams can be challenging. You need to find new ways to build trust with a distributed workforce, as the face-to-face interactions either no longer exist or are few and far between.

Some employees might abuse the freedom of working from home without the in-office accountability. Plus, you must communicate effectively when managing remote workers, ensuring they’re in the loop every step of the way.

Motivating remote workers and encouraging collaboration between dispersed teams can also prove challenging. And the kicker? Through it all, you must ensure productivity doesn’t suffer.

Benefits of remote employees

Without the wasted time and frustrations of commuting to work, virtual employees can dive right into work.

That might mean they start earlier and work later than they normally would if they worked in the office. And tapping into technology enables your remote workforce to easily collaborate and effectively communicate, allowing projects to stay on track.

The same can be said for boosting the efficiency of meetings and even reducing the need for them. This often translates to increased productivity and financial savings for the company, such as no longer needing to supply office space and furniture for remote workers.

In fact, one study found that “in comparison with the employees who came into the office, the at-home workers were not only happier and less likely to quit but also more productive.”

When managing remote employees, you can boost your chance for success by having a solid plan in place to address the unique challenges mentioned above. You need to strike a balance between your need for oversight and employees’ desire for freedom and flexibility.

If you’re wondering how to effectively manage remote employees, consider following these best practices for a telecommuting workforce.

1. Communication

At the heart of managing remote teams lies a solid communication plan. Just like in-office employees, remote workers need to know what’s going on with the company, their department or division, and any tasks or projects they’re involved in.

You should be engaging with them every day in some form to keep them in the loop. And don’t rely on just one channel, such as email. Call them on the phone, use video chats, conduct small group videoconferences, and take advantage of collaborative project management tools to stay in touch.

On the flip side, don’t get so caught up in connecting via technology that you fail to plan for regular face-to-face meetings. These can occur weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, depending on the needs of both your business and your remote employees.

These in-person interactions can take the form of one-on-one discussions, training workshops, coaching programs, small group meetings, and skills development sessions.

Communication in the workplace is already complex and challenging, and poor communication issues are magnified for remote employees.

2. Set clear expectations

Since you don’t have direct oversight and see people face-to-face, you need to know specifically what the expectations are and how to succeed.

Issues related specifically to working from home, for example, include the need to know when these remote employees are available, how quickly you expect them to respond to emails or calls, and how you plan to track and report their progress on tasks and projects.

Plus, you will need to clearly set specific expectations on the assignments, goals, and performance of your remote workers. Just like workplace communication issues, problems setting expectations are magnified when you don’t see your employees every day. Having a good work from home policy in place helps mitigate these problems.

3. Transparency and trust

Managing remote employees requires building trust and transparency, and this goes both ways. Managers need to have transparency into the work that remote employees are producing and trust that these workers are meeting the expectations.

Remember, just being in the office doesn’t guarantee that employees are engaged and productive. As long as the work is getting done – even if it’s not during the typical 9-to-5 schedule – that’s all that matters. (It might be worth it to invest in project management tools to monitor and track remote employees’ work.)

At the same time, remote employees also need to have transparency into what is happening in the office and trust that their work is helping meet larger goals and objectives.

4. Utilize collaborative tools

It’s no accident that the rise of remote workers and the rise of collaborative tools such as cloud-based file sharing, online document management systems, and project management software, have gone hand-in-hand.

The technology makes it possible to work faster, more efficiently, and from anywhere. So, you do need to use these systems with remote workers.

However, you can’t simply turn on the technology and expect everything to run smoothly. When you physically work in the same location, you can stop by someone’s desk to clarify a comment or pass them in the hallway to ask a question.

But when someone works remotely, you lose this check-in opportunity. Therefore, you need to make sure you are leveraging the technology in a way that overcomes the distance. In other words, use the tools, but use them differently than you would if you sat in the same office.

A policy management solution like PowerDMS can be a critical part of the technology web that holds your remote teams together. For example, our policy management software allows you to create, edit, disseminate, and publish critical content your entire team needs to do their jobs, accessible from wherever they work.