5 Tips to Empower Your Remote Employees Work More Efficiently (& Their Most Common Challenges)

Introduction

The world is shifting from big corporate offices to their employee’s remote workstations. With changing times, companies have started adjusting their sails to continue thriving in today’s rapidly disrupting economy.

Is your business ready to embrace this paradigm shift? Are your employees empowered to work efficiently from their comfort zone?

If not, now is the time to train your people to work effectively from their comfort zone. Throughout this post, we will be sharing the most common challenges faced by remote employees and five tips to empower them to work more productively. If you re excited, let’s get going.

Most Common Challenges Faced While Working Remotely:

Working remotely may sound compelling but it comes with its own set of challenges. Let’s quickly look through few of the most common challenges faced by remote employees.

• Lack of Physical Presence

Face-to-face interactions are important as they make execution seamless and increases efficiency. However, when working from home, many employees feelthat their managers are out of reach when needed and hence contribute less in getting the work done.

• Information Inaccessibility:

When your employees are working remotely, locating crucial business information can be a major challenge. Retrieving answers to even the simplest questions can consume considerable time.

• Socially Departed:

We humans are social beings. We long for comradeship and conversations with our companions. When your employees are working remotely, they feel socially isolated — especially when their colleagues are operating in a different timezone. Ultimately, this may make them feel they don’t belong to the organization on a longer run.

• Distractions:

5 Tips for Empowering Your Remote Employees Work Efficiently

When it comes to working remotely — the benefits outweigh its challenges. And hence, with the right strategies, you can empower your team to work effectively and accomplish more. Here are 5 tips that will help you manage your remote employees pragmatically.

Keep Communication Seamless & Proactive:

Efficient and effective communication is what empowers exceptional execution. When your team is working remotely, communication is the first thing you should manage. Your employees need the means to communicate and collaborate in real-time — irrespective of their physical location.

Set Clear Priorities & Deadlines

Popular research unveils that only about half of all the professionals are aware of what’s expected of them at work. This can adversely impact their engagement and commitment towards an organization. If you’re seeking to engage your remote employees, it’s important to set clear expectations about how they should interact and collaborate.

Keep Them Engaged
Engagement, among your remote employees, is crucial to keep them motivated and productive. Finding ways to make your employees feel valued and respected can be challenging. It’s up to you to figure out a way to engage your people. For instance, you can start off by holding a virtual meetup where everyone talks about their interests, and hobbies. This way, you will be able to know your people on a personal level — which will help you manage them more effectively.

Regularly Hold One-On-One Calls

When all your employees are working remotely, you may find it challenging to keep up with each one of them. This is where one-on-one calls come into play. Through these calls, you can personally interact with your employees to understand their challenges, opportunities for improvement, and much more. You can have a call every once in a while. It could be thrice a month or once every week – depending on your organization and resource allocation.

Don’t Macro Manage – Be Flexible

When you’re working with your remote employees it is essential to understand that they like to work flexibly. Macro managing your employees may hamper their overall performance throughout the day. You can encourage flexibility by allowing them to work as per their timeline. If it comes to measuring work, you can use OKRs and KPIs to measure their overall productivity.

Final Words:

While all the above-mentioned tips will help you keep your employees engaged, we would still recommend you to embrace new tactics and see what works for you best. With the world turning to remote working opportunities, now would be the right time to prepare your business for embracing the new normal.

With remote teams, you can…

• Save large investments on big corporate offices
• Hire talented resources from any part of the world
• Increase job satisfaction of your employees
• Give more autonomy to your employees
• Reduce your turnover
• Promote a healthier work-life balance

If you’ve already started creating your team, what you’ll also need is a robust and reliable system to manage them well. And with our Ultimate Business System, we have got you covered.

Give us a shout, and let us give you a demo of our one-of-its-kind system that will help you connect your people, optimize processes, and elevate your business.