One of the biggest challenges in today’s world is managing remote employees. Usually, when you don’t have the same geographical proximity to work together as your peers. So, to ensure a productive business culture and make the most of working from home you must understand how to manage remote employees effectively and provide your company with successful results.
Particularly in the tech field, remote techs present a multitude of challenges for companies to manage. So, what is the best way to work with these employees effectively? It’s simple! To get employees’ attention at the workplace, remove the physical barrier.
Let’s discuss this in more detail and know how remote employees can have an engaging working experience while meeting the company’s goals.
Listen to This Podcast to Learn More About Managing Remote Employees!
Rethink 2023 BeThink 23 Strategies!
For engaging remote employees with a tremendous work experience in 2023, a company owner should incorporate these 23 strategies in their business.
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Start an Anonymous Suggestion Box-
It’s necessary to address the root cause of the problem to avoid the issues coming to a surface later. Therefore, gaining insight into your employees’ thoughts should be done to collect their feedback and it’s possible via an anonymous suggestion box.
Ensure that your employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions. Show that you value their input by letting them know of the changes you plan to make based on their suggestions. To establish trust and increase employee productivity, employee engagement, and retention, host conversations in team meetings to demonstrate that their voices are being heard and they matter.
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Security Audits-
It is necessary to have a security protocol in the company. To prevent the data breach, seek professionals to help you maintain this security system in-house.
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Keep Mentoring Your Employees-
If your company already has a formal mentoring session, it’s great. But if not, it’s the perfect time to start a mentoring program to launch online training for those willing to join hands with your company. Keep geographical distance from acting as a block in your business. Instead, treat it as an opportunity to train your employees remotely to perform better at the workplace.
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Keep Mental Health a Priority-
Maintain your employees’ mental health while being compassionate with them. To incorporate the same, ensure adding these suggestions:
- Offer training to ensure empathy stays at work and between employees.
- Give employees an app to meditate and deal with things that are bothering them on a personal/ professional level.
- Host workshops to teach mental health.
- Hire mental health coaches and assign them to employees to prevent burnout.
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Compliance Check-
Also, keep conducting a compliance check to ensure there is no increase in the wage risk! Nor are any hour violations.
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Alert and threshold warning-
As a company owner, you need to set alerts about the cost to keep your labor cost in control. Make a system to schedule, time-keep, and send alerts to employees who are doing overtime or failing to punch in. All these alerts help ensure proper compliance with the laws and rules of the company.
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Easy to Track the Work Time-
You can streamline time with tools designed to help you with workforce management. One among these tools is Empmonitor. You can track attendance, timesheet, and work location (GPS) to ensure automated recording of day-to-day business.
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Train Front Line Managers on Remote Team Management-
The training on managing remote teams can help managers collaborate with their teams better. And to do the same, here are the tips you can follow-
- Give more positive feedback in place of negative feedback.
- Be grateful and learn to say- thank you for the small things they do for you.
- Let your employees know they matter and appreciate them for the situations they handled.
- Have team goals in place of handing them directly.
- Make them collaborate with team members for better connection.
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Offer flexible schedules when possible-
Practice and offer flexible shifts to employees to let them manage personal & professional needs. And this is possible with EmpMonitor in which employees schedule their time in a timesheet and help the employee meet both personal and professional goals.
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Track Time and Labour Metrics
Tracking employee time is primary, as it lets you decide the main and side areas. With EmpMonitor, you can check the employee details relating to hiring, compensation, time and labour, training, engagement, and retention. Monitoring your remote workforce will allow you to optimize it.
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Provide visual shift Swap Board-
Create a virtual shift swap board where managers can add their schedules, and employees can add the shifts they don’t want or want to take. Practice trust between team and employees should let their team members decide the shift timing once a week.
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Start an employee recognition program-
An appreciation program lets your employee feel valued and make them deliver more in the required timeline. Start an initiative to promote your best-performing employee every month and make them feel appreciated to do more.
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Level the playing field-
Ensure to keep the work field clean and fresh for employees to perform. If your remote employee senses the existence of favoritism, they will lose the drive to work and ultimately leave the company. Ensure to give equal chances to all employees to be the star performer rather than just promoting one employee. To ensure your employees feel motivated.
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Revisit job roles and processes-
As an employer, analyze the job, reporting mechanism, meetings, and review process. Keeping remote employee management in good standing requires speaking out in the remote setting! Since it’s difficult to gauge the issue a remote worker faces.
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Be Proactive-
Be the initiative taker to set up calls, bring the team together, and assign group tasks for your team to make them comfortable. Also, learn to respect the diversity of approaches in doing tasks and pick the one that saves the most of your time.
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Daily Manager Check-ins-
A daily check-in with your remote team members can be the most productive thing you can do as an employer. Your team of experts or newbies want to feel a connection with you, to work with you. Such regular check-ins can result in building trust and engagement with the team. And also promote outcomes like- profitability, productivity, turnover, absenteeism, quality, and customer ratings.
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Encourage time off for employees-
Running a company comes down to managing remote employees hired for a specific role. Therefore it’s the responsibility of the management to keep their employee privacy and creativity intact. Good leadership should set its example by not expecting employees to take calls or revert right away on vacation. Keeping employees unplugged from official responsibilities is the gift companies should start giving to retain employees.
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Formalize virtual enrollment-
You can create a virtual team to train employees on- how to collaborate on the platform and identify issues that require discussion or call. Also, share a response time for an email or call/ DM, telegram, slack, etc.
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Flexible Schedules Where Possible-
Be a leader that assigns goals and gives the freedom to employees to work on a task the way they like. While a boss will not only assign but rather dictate everything from start to end to make the employee feel unworthy.
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Career Advancement-
The challenges of managing remote employees also prevent career advancement opportunities. So ensure to offer career advancement opportunities to your employees for growth. Give onsite options to all employees and make the hardworking employees feel recognized not just by words but by action by believing in their potential and letting them meet the juniors/newbies.
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Create Collaboration Policies-
Use Empmonitor and ask employees to use the same to fill the time sheet and record their time. With the former tool, you can also book your time spent on a task, in a meeting, reading, researching, guiding, or working. You can record the same using four types of time- Active time, Office time, Productive time, Unproductive time, and Neutral time. These are the deciding factors for generating a productivity percentage and proof of work for an employee.
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Improve Remote Onboarding-
Ensure the virtual onboarding platform is easy to understand and follow for a new joiner. Also, include a personal touch to make employees feel part of the organization. One way of managing remote employees is by using a welcome slide. And mention their names, pictures, and years of experience. To make them feel part of the new organization while onboarding.
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Encourage time off-
Promote an environment where employees can feel free to take breaks and reconnect to work when they feel fresh. Taking breaks can act as a productivity booster for your business.
Read More Blogs – Managing Remote Employees
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Conclusion
In a nutshell, we found that the businesses that succeeded at managing remote employees either did so by using tools to make the process easier, such as virtual collaboration rooms and EmpMonitor, or by training their front-line managers to handle management in a virtual environment. But with these 23 tips and strategies, you should be able to create a plan that works for your remote employees in 2023.
