In today’s workforce, the remote team is prevalent during the coronavirus pandemic. A few months ago, companies didn’t use to allow their employees to work out of the workplace, but coronavirus diseases caused them to work remotely from home and stay safe.
It has become one of the biggest challenges to maintain a remote team to work the way companies want to do. Many companies are facing challenges and worrying about whether their employees are working together on the same goal or not.
The coronavirus crisis has changed the way people used to live and work as earlier. It has brought a new norm called working from home, which is quite challenging for many industries to work and grow their business in that way.
Well, keeping all these things in mind, I have come up with the most effective challenges to maintain a remote team to work the way you want to do with improved productivity and enhanced efficiency.
So, let’s get started!
The following are the most effective challenges that will help to maintain your remote team to work smartly for the ultimate growth of your business;
Build a strong company culture
This is the most essential way to maintain remote teams to work towards the same goal. It takes time for business owners to develop a good company culture among the team member.
It requires hiring the right candidates, providing open communication, and maintaining the same culture across the board. Be sure you create a professional and friendly environment to build a strong company culture that employees love about.
When it comes to remote work, you need to put much effort and time to develop a good company culture among the remote team. For that, you can build a plan and strategy to interact with your employees and communicate with them in a better way.
Be sure your remote team is able to communicate with everyone, including the owner of a company with an open-door policy.
To make a company culture look fun and energetic, you can schedule and conduct fun events, gift cards for employees, and other events to have fun together with them.
Effective communication
Communication is one of the best ways to know everything from team activities and task status to client management and project work. Communication plays a vital role in all aspects of a company and helps them to run their business the way they want through effective communication within the team.
When employees are working remotely, it is very important to have a proactive communication among all team members to know which person is working on a particular task or project. Sending emails to employees regarding the task or project work doesn’t allow quick conversations.
To maintain a remote team, the company needs to create an internal tool like Slack that allows business owners to communicate with their employees across multiple channels.
You can manage a good communication between your employees and managers and stay updated with the status of a given task on Slack. This is a great way to foster two-way communication among your team members.
Track work and productivity of employees
Do you have any idea of how your remote team completes a particular task and at what price? Many managers are not able to answer this question. It often gets difficult to determine the rate based on the productivity of a particular team person.
For that, managers need to build a strategic matric to track the productivity of all employees. The matrics can help to determine how much work is completed per day.
For example,
- Conducting a short meeting to discuss the ongoing work
- To schedule 5 posts per hour on social media.
- To create and maintain a blog post.
- Making 200 cold calls per day.
Creating and managing business strategies this way can help to maintain a remote team and calculate the productivity of employees according to their accomplished work per day.
Getting together in person
Getting to know your employees in person is one of the best parts of working with them. It is difficult and takes time to know them in person especially when they are living in different time zones and locations.
For that, you can create a plan to meet with all employees twice a year or at least once a year. You can also plan a shared trip to meet together to have fun with all employees. This helps to know your employees better and encourages them to build trust in you.
Problems with Scheduling
Sometimes, it becomes quite challenging to schedule a phone call or zoom meeting because of different time zones. When you work with freelancers who have irregular work schedule often makes you more difficult to schedule a meeting with them.
Knowing a time that works well for all employees requires determination on what number of people are living in different time zones. There are various tools available online to schedule and conduct a phone call or video meeting remotely and join together on the boards.
Tell your remote team and other employees to attend every meeting on time whether it is about phone calls or video call meetings. It is often seen many freelancers who work from home do not attend the meeting or phone call when needed.
When you give a message saying- it is mandatory for everyone to join each meeting, will be quite helpful for managers and the owners of a company to overcome such challenges and maintain a remote team in a better way.
Building trust
It often becomes difficult to build trust for employees whether they will be paid on time or not and managers worry about the employees not completing a particular task within a deadline.
For that, you need to be transparent to build trust among the company’s employees and managers. Be sure to open about the following things:
- Pay rate
- Working hours
- Payment timeline
- Project requirements
- Project updates
Try to be honest and clear in terms of pay rate, working hours, project requirements, and mostly in the payment timeline to build trust between company and employees and run your business in the right way.
The Bottom Line
There are a lot of challenges to maintain remote teams to work together towards the same goal. You can overcome all these challenges by building effective communications, tracking teamwork and activities, creating a strong company culture, scheduling phone calls or video meetings, building trust, and getting them in person.
If you follow all the above methods, you will definitely be able to overcome all the challenges to maintain your remote team to work positively.