How to Prepare Your Business for Remote Workers
You hear business owners talk about their remote teams with pride, and it seems all too simple and easy to be true. While relying on your remote workforce is more than a plausible way to expand and grow your teams, it takes a certain amount of preparation, and you’ll need to take a strategic approach to succeed. Because, let’s face it, maintaining productivity and motivation, let alone company loyalty from afar are certainly not easy feats. Still, know that 70% of people around the world work remotely at least once a week, so this is not a trend that will pass any time soon or one that you should neglect to use to your advantage.
If you’re new to the concept of remote workers, both in-house and as external collaborators in the form of freelancers and contractors, you need a plan. Here are a few handy ways to brace your business to switch to remote work and help those teams integrate well with the rest of your workforce smoothly and seamlessly.
Choose the best communication tech
The very reason that has enabled you to make the switch is also your main tool to make the transition successful – tech! Luckily, since we’re years into the practice of working with people remotely, you have at your disposal dozens of applications, software tools, and cloud solutions that help many reputable companies work with people from all over the world.
Start with a project management platform that will cover the needs of your team and help you track all those deliverables on each project, no matter where your employees are. Many of them have built-in chat platforms, but you can also use separate communication tools for ongoing exchanges. If you have a large organization, then other software solutions to manage your leads and your data on a cloud can also be of great help to integrate them with ease.
Perfect your recruitment efforts
Having access to so many excellent candidates now that you’ve opened your doors to remote workers means that you also need to make sure you choose the right ones. Even though it’s easy to hire someone from abroad or even someone in the same city who chooses to work from home, you still need to check if they are the right fit for your business.
Just as you would interview all of your applicants at the office, create a selection process to eliminate unsuitable candidates based on their skills, portfolios, and references. Adapt your job postings to make sure you attract the right people and focus on the perks you offer to your remote teams, that alone will be enough to filter many candidates out of the race.
Update your hiring policies
Advanced regions are adapting fast to the trend of remote work. Look at Australia, where almost 50% of their workers choose to work remotely for the majority of each week. If you’re looking into candidates from that particular region, it pays to understand their legal rights, their expectations, as well as their potential to help your business grow.
Due to this surge of digitalization, the interest in administration jobs in Sydney is on the rise, and your business can work with experts in the field to adapt to the local needs and regulations. That way, you can quickly adapt your in-house policies to be able to offer excellent opportunities to interested workers, while you simplify the paperwork and the onboarding processes for your remote workers everywhere. Whether you work with a legal assistant from the region where your remote teams will be, or you hire an HR coordinator to find the right talent for you, your business ultimately benefits either way.
Ensure your remote teams are engaged
Supervision and motivation are the two key factors that allow your employees to flourish working with your brand. There’s a hierarchy, ease of collaboration, face-to-face interaction, and an emotional bond between your business and your teams. Alas, the same is not easily achieved for your remote workers.
Before you start hiring remotely, make sure that you create strategies to engage them and make the most of those collaborations. For starters, always create a consistent feedback loop to let them know you’re monitoring their progress, but also to let them know their own opinion is valued – so they should give feedback about your operations, too. Allow them to join those weekly roundup meetings and voice their opinions, which will help them feel they belong. And ultimately, find ways to reward them the same way you do your in-house teams – they’ll feel appreciated no matter how rarely they get to see you in person.
Hiring remotely is far from a new trend. Use these tips to prepare your company for that lucrative transition, and let your brand bloom with the help of global talent that eagerly awaits collaborating with you.
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmarkblog.com