If you have already shifted to remote staffing, you must have encountered new challenges because approaching remote-based employees and making them work efficiently requires a whole different level of skills. Adjusting yourself to this new normal can be tricky. Still, all challenges of remote teams can indeed be managed perfectly only if you know the ins & outs of remote staffing.
4 Problems with Remote Working of Staff & Ways to Overcome Them
According to Workable’s New Work of Work Survey, the two significant challenges managing remote teams include ‘individual employee engagement and lack of motivation.’
Because Winnors Remote Professionals has extensive experience, we can help you highlight top managing remote teams challenges and offer practical solutions to resolve them at the earliest.
Let’s see how to tackle challenges facing remote teams.
Ineffective Collaboration and Hindered Communication
Remote team management challenges start from here!
Communicating with offshore teams can be full of hiccups, and without smooth talk, all you will be left with is failed task management. Due to different time zones, scheduling a call or a video conference feels like a nightmare. Ineffective communication can also be due to the lack of the human element, as understanding a person’s sentiments, motivation, attitude, and energy is relatively difficult over the internet.
Handling high-scale ventures with proper coordination with several remote teams is arduous for every manager. Besides, what do you plan to do if your remote partner stops responding? Imagine! Frustrating, right? Therefore, you must find diverse ways to stay in touch with every remote employee, letting a collaborative environment flourish.
Getting instant opinions or feedback, sharing expertise, and exchanging ideas with remote teams may seem uncomfortable. Due to a lack of communication and physical absence, managers are more inclined to talk with the in-house team and solve problems swiftly. But don’t you think they deserve the luxury of being respected and included in work-related decisions?! Well, it will only be possible with upright communication.
The physical absence of the team member makes communication difficult resulting in unreliable work schedules, unawareness regarding the progress, and compromised quality of work. Regardless of the type of remote work, good communication is necessary to keep projects in order and constantly progressing.
Challenges in managing remote teams cannot be counted, but how would you overcome communication challenges on a remote team?
Solutions:
- Have calls rather than only communicating through email every time.
- Foster two-way communiqué to overcome remote working team challenges.
- Implement management tools for centralised communication and digital collaboration (Asana, Trello, etc.).
- Schedule regular check-ins to keep the manager informed.
- Plan a general schedule that suits everyone.
- Put business-wide communication norms in place and reassure that everyone abides.
- Make sure your employee is available during working hours.
- Pick the best digital channel to encourage interpersonal communication – the right tool for the right moment (Slack, Zoom, etc.).
- Never let business-related meetings go off the clock.
- Use online polls and calendaring apps.
Disorganised Monitoring
One of the biggest remote team challenges is to monitor them to confirm they are working honestly and passionately. After all, it needs time to cultivate trustworthiness, mainly due to the inability to supervise the team physically. Who knows if employees are not wasting time or resources, working on their projects accurately, or outshining the competition!
You can say accountability of remote employees and their accomplishments is a guesswork. It is harder to track the offshore teams’ motivation and efficiency.
Solutions:
- Bring KPI metrics in practice for remote employees similar to KPIs used for evaluating the in-house team.
- Don’t forget to collect feedback from both clients and employees.
- Join hands with a remote staffing agency, as they will take your burden away from maintaining the high-level productivity of remote workers.
- Arrange sync meetings and regular one-on-one check-ins.
- Use online time-tracking tools.
Heightened Cybersecurity Risk
The increased risk of losing confidential data, cyberattacks, and hacking come with a distributed workforce. Remote staffing is dangerous for both employees and companies from financial as well as reputational aspects because teams make themselves more vulnerable to malware by moving to digital space with centralised resources.
Trusting remote employees enough to share essential files can go wrong if they come out unreliable or fraudulent. One cannot closely check offshore staff’s devices and networks.
Solutions:
- Implement internet security applications.
- Make use of password managers.
- Ensure to have secure virtual private network (VPN) services.
Different and Incompatible Culture
Are there any team challenges for remote workers? A trouble that is very much knotted with communication is the elimination of cultural breaches creating unwanted hindrances!
We usually hear that the managers inside the office shape culture. Well, it seems impossible for remote staffing because they are not physically present in the same office. The company culture is fabricated on corporate parties, team-building training, and casual discussions, but working with an isolated team can make it perplexing.
Moreover, individuals hired from the distant place from various ethnicities may follow different traditions, religious norms, and cultural values. In this case, keeping people with different personalities, languages, and values in peace is difficult and will create an unhealthy company culture, especially when they seldom get the chance to communicate one-on-one.
Understanding one another and establishing smooth cross-cultural communication over huge distances requires much effort.
Solutions:
- Arrange team-building activities for overwhelming cultural differences – happy hour, gaming time, or a random chit-chat.
- Make English a primary language to communicate.
- Define your company’s culture, mission statement, core values, and professional beliefs.
- Inspire regular virtual social interaction to create an emotional bond and share their common interests.
- Offer emotional support to relieve stress and celebrate successes with appreciative gestures.
- Ensure that your remote staff share the same values and culture to maintain quality and transparency within a friendly environment.
Hire Remote Staff Within 24 Hours
To turn the challenges of managing and leading multiple and remote teams into a successful venture, you must focus on even the tiniest details of the working plans. And Winnors Remote Professionals can be your successful partner!
We connect you with top-tier professionals and offer remote staff management. Based on smart & compliant employment contracts, we provide you with candidates after deeply scientific, multi-layered screening, showing valid, reliable, and fair results.
