How To Work Effectively With Your Remote Workers

Last Updated on November 7, 2018 by Jessica Adams

Over the last decade or so, you may have noticed that a huge shift has taken place in the workplace. There are more people than ever before, working from wherever they darn-well want to work. These people are called remote workers because their positions are just that, remotely positioned from the main office of a company.

Most people work out of their home offices while others rent co-working spaces. Sure some remote workers still work at coffee shops but today, many of them work from the beach! It’s been dubbed “the laptop lifestyle” and because of today’s computer and cell phone technology, it’s easier than ever to truly be remote, as you work.

If you have or are thinking of hiring remote workers, it’s important that you take the necessary steps to ensure that you’re able to work effectively as a team. You may have half of your team working from the other side of the world but if you have solid systems in place, the time that you do “get together” over a video conference call, will be productive and well spent.

The following are five different areas, crucial to the process of remote workers. Their ability to connect and work effectively within their team is found in each of these five points.

How To Work Effectively

With Your Remote Workers

Speak Before Hiring

For most people, there’s nothing they’d want more than to work from the comfort of their own home. But that doesn’t apply to everyone. Others prefer the process of the commute and working in a traditional working environment with team members nearby.

It’s also worth remembering that even if people want to work from home, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be good at it. As such, it’s important that you hire people you know can handle working without someone looking over their shoulder. Trust is a big part of remote work: you need to be confident that the person you’ve hired can perform their duties as a self-starter.

Let’s say your team is scattered over 12,000 miles and one of them isn’t checking in. Your first thought might be, “is she with friends while she should be working?” This is where trust comes in. If you trust your team but someone’s late to check in, your mood is fine. If you don’t trust this particular team member and they’re missing, your mind could start playing tricks on you!

Weekly Meetings

You’ll be working independently, but you’re still a team. This means that you’ll need to talk with one another rather often. It’s not enough just to communicate via email; while it’ll “get the job done,” it won’t help your team progress in the most cohesive way possible.

So commit to a weekly meeting via a video conferencing web application, such as Zoom. It’ll give you a chance to talk more freely about how each of your team members is getting along with their current projects.

It will also help each of your remote workers develop a personal relationship with each other. This will help them so much when it comes to having to work closely on a project that has an intimate feel to it. You can’t fake things like emotion and expect that fraudulent expression to convey over the life of a project.

The Right Infrastructure

Remote working requires more than just the right mindset; there are some tools you’ll need to have, too. Everything will run much smoother if you have the latest software incorporated into your company. Take cloud storage for example, which is imperative in allowing your team to access all of the important company documents, regardless of where they generated from.

If you don’t yet have cloud storage, then you opt to work with a company like www.intelligis.com, and make it part of your business. It’ll help foster collaboration, communication, and productivity among your remote workers.

Meet Face to Face (Once In a While)

You’re a remote team, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get together in “real life” from time to time! Both to work and play. Depending on how spread across the world you really are, there’s a good chance that it won’t put everyone out to meet quarterly at a central destination. Most remote teams consist of workers who live in the same country.

Let’s say this is the case in this example and your team resides in America. If 3 of your members are on the east coast, 3 are on the west coast and 2 are in what is called the “central zone” or “middle America”, chances are your team is going to meet up somewhere between Chicago, St. Louis, Houston or Austin, both in Texas.

You can also organize a bi-annual get together focused on group vacations, perhaps once a year with everyone’s families in tow. This will be a tremendous treat for the entire team and help bring them closer together. This is also a good time to dissolve any of the barriers that may have grown between team members over the past year. Everyone enjoys working for a company if they feel like they know their colleagues on a personal level.

Reaching Goals

Finally, remember to set monthly goals for your team. Remote work is less about the time spent working, and more about the possibilities of the work it can achieve. Having a clear plan and systems in place to achieve the goal, will help keep everyone focused and on task. Still, it can be difficult to work on attaining anything team-oriented, without your team physically surrounding you.

Each team member should work on their own plans and systems in place to help get them to the finish line, taking responsibility for a certain area of a goal. This way the task of reaching the goal will feel cohesive, even if you’re working on your section on the beach in Bali (I wish!).

Jessica Rose Adams