Small business owners can cut costs by hiring work-from-home employees, while large enterprises may choose remote workers so they can hire the best of the best no matter what country they live in.
Still, other companies offer remote work options to long-time employees as an added job perk.
Yet managing remote employees and projects has its own unique challenges—including security issues, managing different time zones and quality collaboration.
Even an experienced manager may struggle when managing their first remote team. To improve your chances of success, avoid the following top five common pitfalls.
1. Poor communication
Clear and concise communication is the cornerstone of any remote project because your employees are not in an office where you can stop by for a quick face-to-face chat. If your work hours vary, someone may find themselves stuck until they can reach a manager or a specific coworker for clarification.
Instead, you can:
- Schedule live meetings. Everyone involved in a particular project should have a phone call or video meeting at least once a week to touch base on progress, answer questions, and set future goals.
- Invest in quality software. A good chat messaging program combined with a quality email software will ensure employees have several ways to communicate quickly when unexpected questions or problems arise.
- Clarify communication guidelines. It’s not always intuitive who should be contacted for particular questions or which questions are urgent. By outlining who to contact, how, and when based on different problem types, employees will know exactly where to turn for help.
With good communication practices, you’ll clear much of the issues that might lead to tasks overlapping or others not being done at all.
2. Overloading resources
When you work together with a team in a physical office, it is sometimes easier to see who is taking on the majority of project tasks and who is free for more work.
In a remote setting, however, it can be difficult to tell if an employee is struggling with an overload of assignments.
Managers can fall into a pattern of automatically assigning important tasks to the most efficient employee. Yet that employee may already be overwhelmed.
To avoid piling on too much responsibility on a single team member, it’s important to delegate tasks among multiple people.
Consider the employee’s past performance on similar tasks as well as simply asking them what tasks they enjoy most.
After your team has a few projects together under their belts, it will be easier to identify what areas each employee excels at.
Ensure everyone understands their responsibilities, and the responsibilities of their teammates, by utilizing project management software.
This allows you to assign tasks, create a project timeline, and track progress in a way that all relevant employees can access.
3. Forgetting about diversity
When you have employees all over the country, or all around the globe, it becomes essential to embrace flexibility.
Everything from time zones to important holidays can vary for each person, and a good manager takes this into consideration. Trying to force everyone to conform to one particular schedule will drastically limit the number of employees who want to work for your company.
Culturally diverse teams have been shown to deliver more creative outcomes and solutions to problems.
Without providing flexibility and meeting the varying needs of a diverse workforce, however, you may not land these people on your team.
4. Limiting access to resources
To avoid delays in reaching your deadlines, team members need access to all important documents and resources for the project.
They may need to work on certain parts simultaneously, and they will need a way to share their work with the rest of the team.
For software development projects, this could mean utilizing a development platform like GitHub. For images and text documents, a secure cloud storage service like Dropbox or Google Drive will allow everyone to access the same files.
Whichever platforms you choose, clearly outline how to use them and which ones to use for different parts of a project.
If you can’t find a software that fits your company’s needs, consider a custom solution. While it may cost more upfront to have a custom enterprise-level software solution developed, it can dramatically improve your team’s productivity.
A custom solution can be designed specifically around your company’s needs to ensure you have all the features you need and none that you don’t.
5. Depriving employees of social connections
While remote work has several perks, it can also feel isolating at times. You want to encourage connection and socialization among employees, even when they live hours apart.
There are several ways you can do this:
- Set certain times during the day or week that employees should all be available. Having this overlap in schedules not only makes collaboration simpler, but it also gives employees the chance to communicate via phone or instant message and feel more connected.
- Communicate frequently. Have a set schedule in place for how often you’ll communicate with the team as a whole, whether that’s during a phone call or in a group email. Frequent, consistent communication will make your employees feel more connected to you and the project.
- Think outside the inbox. Talking about work all the time gets boring. Consider having morning coffee breaks or a short after-work virtual social hour where small groups of employees can video call each other simply to chat and hang out. Maybe a gamification tactic or two will help a bit.
If groups of employees live close enough to each other, your company can pay for meetups throughout the year. If it’s within your budget, you might even host an annual get together and fly everyone to a central location for a weekend retreat.
Be the Glue that Keeps the Team Together
Whether it’s your first remote project or your fiftieth, it’s important to always review the strengths and weaknesses of your current tools and procedures.
The sooner you identify anything that’s not working, the quicker you can correct it.
Check-in frequently with your team for feedback on what would best help them succeed at their jobs. When your employees are happy and successful, your projects will be too.
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This is a guest post by Heather Redding. Heather is a content manager for rent, hailing from Aurora. She loves to geek out writing about wearables, IoT and other hot tech trends. When she finds the time to detach from her keyboard, she enjoys her Kindle library and a hot coffee. Reach out to her on Twitter.
