Challenges of Managing Remote Employees and How to Overcome Them?

Work culture within a remote team has become a common discussion since the idea of remote work took the world by storm in a pandemic-stricken world. Earlier, it wasn’t common for companies to work outside their offices, but due to COVID-19 our world changed. For some, adopting remote work culture was a surprise, while it was nothing new for others. It’s quite challenging to manage a remote team, especially when you wish to work like typical office days.

The pandemic has changed our traditional working ways. Working from home is a new adventure for many employees. For employers, handling the workflow and maintaining office culture is challenging. With Aspired (the remote agency), you can easily manage and overcome your daily remote work concerns.

How to Manage Remote Employees Effectively?

Hiring remote workers or freelancers is common practice now amongst the various types of industries. So, why take a risk and hire a remote expert agency. However, it is crucial to understand that businesses face several challenges and complications daily.

To manage your remote employees, you must first identify your remote team’s problems and solve them efficiently. Hence, the following are the common issues you may face in your remote agency and Aspired’s advice to overcome them;

Communication

Indeed, communication is the key to success for your remote employees. It’s important for your agency to gather input from all employees and know their tasks for the day. When you’ve a remote team, it isn’t easy to foster open communication. Traditional email communication is like a formal channel, but it doesn’t enable faster conversations.

By building a dedicated channel for formal communication like Slack, your team can overcome the communication challenge. Whether the employee is a freelance or a remote employee, they can be on the same page. Furthermore, you can get answers to all the common questions from employees smoothly. This is the best way to foster two-way communication, and the best part is that your remote team won’t feel isolated at all.

Tracking productivity and work

Do you know the daily productivity of your remote team members? For many team leads, the work rate is not clear. It’s hard for them to know which employee is not pulling their own weight or being well-underutilizing. Due to this reason, the remote team managers must build a proper way to track the work productivity of every individual employee. When you define the amount of work and the number of daily or weekly tasks, you can easily track the work.

You must choose the KPI metrics wisely to evaluate the productivity of your remote team. Every employee, including in-office employees, must follow all the criteria. Your tracking plans will ensure that every individual’s expectations are clear, regardless of where or how they work.

Company culture

The culture of remote agencies takes time to involve hiring the right resource and cultivate. With a strong company culture, you can foster healthy communication and impart that culture across the world. Whether you want to build a fun and energetic team or professional culture, it will require concentration with lots of effort. You’ll witness that culture is well-shaped without any efforts from the manager or owner in some companies. When it comes to developing a healthy working culture with a remote employee, it reflects your business’s values.

It starts from knowing the interaction of a business owner or manager with employees. For example, if you want to promote an open communication culture, your remote employees must communicate with all the managers and CEO. If you want to make your company culture, try to have a fun virtual get-together to play games like a scavenger hunt, one-word story, etc.

Scheduling difficulties

When you want to schedule a video or voice call meeting for your remote team, you face challenges related to time zone differences. This challenge can get more severe with independent contractors with unpredictable work schedules. Well, to manage a team successfully you must find a time that is suitable for everyone. It should coordinate with your remote employee’s general work schedules.

Moreover, you can easily use many advanced tools to schedule online video conferences, voice calls, or meetings with remote employees. You can arrange online polls that contain times and dates which are simple to select. When your employee chooses their feasible date and time, they can participate at the available time. Software and apps have many ways to schedule meetings with zero stress.

Building trust

The flexibility of remote work requires a next-level trust between employees and employers. Managers of the remote team don’t know who’s working at what time. Due to which they face varying levels of productivity and delays in responses.

For remote team members and managers, it’s quite difficult to build trust. Managers have concerns regarding productivity and meeting the deadlines, while the remote team have a wide range of worries, like their payment; whether they’ll be paid or not. So, what will help them both to trust each other? Transparency will allow both parties to build trust. You can be transparent about;

• Working hours
• Pay rate
• Project expectations
• Status updates on projects
• Payment timelines

As for expectations, both of them must be honest about their charges and workload. Several B2B marketing agencies tell their remote employees that they can expect higher pay for their work to increase considerably. Such statements may be well-intentioned, but it might raise trust issues. Indeed, communication is the right way to initiate a worthy trustful relationship in the working profession.

One-on-one meetings and morale

What is the one-on-one meeting? Well, it’s something when people talk face to face in person or via video call. These types of meetings are significant for remote employee’s morale. You may feel like it’s a hassle to schedule meetings for every individual, but this way, you can make employees feel valued.

A one-on-one meeting is like an opportunity where remote employees and employers can give feedback on work performance. However, if you failed to schedule these meetings, your workers may feel out of touch with the agency.

Getting Together in Person

Sometimes, the little laughs and chats you share with employees help them get through a particularly difficult or long shift. Social interactions make workers feel more enjoyable; it’s easy to become demotivated and disconnected but hard to interact happily.

One of the most effective ways to achieve success with a remote employee is to know them personally. However, it’s quite hard in remote work because everyone lives in different time zones and places. You can plan on arranging a get-together/seminar on a video call in the current advanced era. After arranging a virtual meeting, what’s next? How will you interact and know each other?

There are plenty of games that can be played like a scavenger hunt, one word, draw a picture, and many others. These types of games help employers know the personality of every individual.

As the world is going through a pandemic, we could all use a bit of entertaining social interaction. So, get creative and explore new ways to engage with the team. Also, you can ask your employees for fun ideas to keep everyone engaged and connected.

Yes! You can overcome the challenges of your remote employees.

Leading a team of remote employees is never easy. Whether the employee is on permanent status or unexpectedly joined due to a pandemic, you must oversee the whole remote team. You might face some additional hurdles, but that is a part of your company’s growth.

During the whole team management process, you’ll feel plenty of pressure, but stay strong and set an encouraging example with confidence. It will be a lie if you say that you aren’t intimidated by all the hassles. Regardless of what you feel or happen, stay productive, focused, positive. Your smart approach and effective strategies will lead you towards success with remote employees.

Conclusion

Aspired has been successfully managing remote employees’ activities for a very long time. As a remote agency, they offer several companies a huge benefit and help them overcome the challenges with time, patience, and practice.

Generally, you don’t need to expect the new system to work immediately, but the Aspired remote agency’s system is different and unique. They are diligent about identifying potential and exciting challenges a company faces. Then, give trials with creative problem-solving approaches.