The advantages of remote work are not something strange anymore. You will no longer have to worry about traffic, wasting time or annoy gossiping while flexibly and independently managing your schedules to work wherever and whenever you want. It sounds ideal, however, everything has both sides. Many problems can seriously affect your productivity when failing to manage collaboration effectively.
Here are 10 issues that remote working environments often deal with and how to solve them:
- Time–zone
Time–zone is one of the most common issues for any remote teams. Employees come from many different countries with different time-zones whose gaps can even be 12 hours. If managers fail to set a specific time schedule, no meeting or deadline can be achieved. Besides, members should respect real-time in zones of each other so that all are able to work in daylight hours.
- Online meeting
Another problem partly related to time-zone is online meetings. As members may live in different time-zones, the amount of time they can go online together is very modest. In addition, employees tend to avoid meetings for minor notice or with no agenda. Thus, how managers can hold a meeting effectively? Here are some tips:
– Only meet when there is something really important need to be discussed morally.
– Only hold among relevant members.
– Distribute different work progress to different channels in team chat.
– Set a timer and goals to reach at the end of each meeting.
- Cooperative workspace
Collaboration is the core of any companies even a minor unsuitable arrangement can lead to extreme issues. That is why managers need to choose professional tools which are able to process everything in the right order so you can save time, avoid chaos and gain better productivity.
You can find some helpful programs for collaboration management in this link:
https://www.capterra.com/project-management-software/
- Measuring productivity
An evidence which proves that we need streamlined cooperating tools is failing to measure productivity. which tasks have your team members have completed or are working on? Which tasks are ready for you to take over? All need to be reported and updated clearly and frequently. Each task needs to be set expected goals and assigned to specific people.
- Messy communication
Applying tools to remotely work has many advantages yet overuse them will result in converse consequences. You should not chat on an app then share links in another app then share files via another program. As mentioned before, working remotely includes people from many regions so communication methods must be as clear and simple as possible. Managers ought to set up some specific rules to follow.
- Online tools
With the thriving of technology, many aspects of the business have changed significantly. Technical tools have become an indispensable part of remotely working. From communication to schedule synchronizing to tasks assigning we all have applications’ help. For example, you can use Flock or Slack (https://flock.com/), (https://slack.com/) for online meetings and messengers; Google Calendar for general schedule. You just need to choose which one is appropriate for your firm’s structure.
- Feedbacks
Feedbacks is one of the most important steps in any plans yet many managers tend to ignore it after reaching the goals. Remember that result of a project is not everything that matters. You need to give and receive feedback in order to improve the results of many following plans then increase the productivity of the whole company. Managers not only have to give the valuation to employees but also should listen to their ideas about the company’s operation. It will help remote staff bond and encourage their engagement.
- Recruitment
Either to a normal firm or a remote working company, employees are always the top concern. Results of any work depend mostly on them. Searching for a good employee is not simple at all. A staff who is good at working the office may not work well at home remotely. Conversely, an employee who may not perform well in a group may be very efficient in dealing with tasks alone. That is why managers should recruit workers who are really active, adaptive to any working environment. There should be a trial period before officially hiring them so that you can discover all their skills and appropriate tasks they can deal with effectively.
- New members
Being a new person in any groups may be terrifying, which can lead to low engagement and modest productivity. Managers along with other old members should help the new addition get on well with the workflow of firms by:
– Holding online meeting or group chat to walk through all work processes and the role of each staff
– Instructing new employees to make use of currently applied tools
– Couple them with an experienced employee for the first few weeks
- Social interaction
A disadvantage of working remotely is that you do not have colleagues to hang out after office hours or gossip in break time. Lacking bonding among members is certainly a big problem for productivity. Successful companies always highly evaluate the importance of interaction with staff. Managers need to know about their workers’ normal life or habits to offer suitable perks and motivation. It will show employees that you really care about them not just their working results and of course in return, they will feel more natural to actively engage and contribute to your firms.
In short, running a remote business does involve many problems, from communication to engagement. To keep everything under control, managers need to cooperate well with all members, connect them with each other, find tools that help improve the working process. And the most important thing or final goal of many businesses is profit, not the short term but the long-term one. Set it as the core value then build, develop and manage other goals toward it. Not all 10 issues mentioned above are your actual problems so try to find out yours and only focus on them.
