Nowadays, many people prefer remote work. There are a lot of benefits to allowing people to work from home, including more productivity and happiness for the workers. When building a remote team, however, you have to take extra effort to ensure the team stays effective. Here’s some advice for helping you find success with your remote team.
1. Pick Ideal Work for Remote Teams
According to research, many remote workers have higher productivity and job satisfaction. When hiring a remote team, think about how your employees may handle the workload from a distance.
Some common positions for remote work include:
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Translators
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Virtual assistants
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Data entry
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Project management
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Graphic design
Most businesses can use remote teams. Remote workers can include anyone from entry-level workers to those with technical certification and advanced experience.
2. Create Various Avenues of Communication
One of the keys to an effective team is communication. Before you put together your team, you should know how you want to communicate. Use collaboration tools to work on different tasks to keep your employees on task and engaged with your company. For example, by using PDFs, your team can access the documents they need whether they’re working from home or in the office. PDFs are also easy to edit with tools from Adobe Acrobat, so your employees can easily work with the tools they need to do their best solo or team work. Check out these PDF tools, which are helpful for creating, editing text and images on, adding signatures to, or updating the layout of your teams’ PDFs.
When your team works from home, you can also offer helpful tips to keep your workers from feeling isolated or fatigued by remote work. For instance, instead of having a meeting every day, spread out the sessions with team-building exercises.
Schedule check-ins with your team regularly. You can have these check-ins daily, bi-weekly, or however often you need to for various projects. Communication does not have to remain strictly work-related, either. Your team may feel closer to you if you share humor or entertainment — just be sure it’s appropriate for the office.
3. Determine the Style of Remote Work
Whenever you put together a team, it helps to understand the work style of your different team members. For example, some people do better with brief discussions and like to stay strictly business. Others may enjoy thinking and brainstorming out loud via phone calls, messaging, or email. Others may want to think and prepare for joining a meeting to discuss a project.
Not every person will have the same work style. While you can determine the best style for the projects, take into consideration that you may have to allow different styles to find a way to work together as a team, rather than forcing a team member to be more social or another to use written channels more than verbal channels to collaborate.
4. Find Employees Who Thrive Remotely
Keep in mind that not all employees thrive in a remote work environment. Look for people who have experience with remote work. Those who work from home need the right technology, internet service, and scheduling ability.
The decision to hire full-time workers, part-time workers, or freelancers depends on your business needs, budget, and goals as well as the nature of the work you need done, the level of expertise required, and the duration of the project. Which types of workers you hire will determine how many hours a week they can work, how they’re taxed, and what benefits they’re eligible for, so it's important to carefully consider these factors before making any hiring decisions.
Remote work provides flexibility to you and your team. It allows people to work on projects from the comfort of their homes. As long as they have the right technology and personality for the job, all you need to supply are the tools for a happy, successful team.
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