Top 9 Tips To Prepare Your Company to Work Remotely
If you are planning to introduce remote work in your company. You may want to know a few things beforehand. Remote working is not an easy task, there are a lot of challenges and grey areas you need to know about. Here are some awesome and easy tips, that will help you as an employer to prepare your company or business for remote work. These tips will give you a detailed idea of what steps to take as a work-from-home recruiter. So keep reading to know all about remote working.
When a company starts working remotely, building a strong virtual workforce is a must. A strong virtual team is the first step in remote working. But what exactly is a virtual team? It sounds like an absurd phrase, or something that only exists in the digital world and not in reality. “A virtual team is a group of workers (who are not employed at your in-house office space but in a different geographical location) and they communicate and work together using digital tools. While virtual team members can be located in the same physical space, they are often distributed, working remotely in different parts of the city, state or country, or even on the other side of the world!” – according to Ariel Lopez from ProjectManager.
Companies or businesses face some key challenges while building a good remote workforce. The most common amongst them are; “Underqualified candidates, differences in communication style, lack of structure, no right tools available, distrust, slow response time, a lack of office culture, budget issues, scheduling meetings, etc.” Says Stephanie Watkins from Cirkus.
In order to overcome these challenges successfully, companies hire work from home recruiters or work from home headhunters. Experienced work-from-home headhunters can assist you in making a success of your work-from-home employment-based operations model. But in case you want to do the process of working virtually all by yourself, from A to Z, here are nine tips that will make you a smart work-from-home recruiter.
All an employer needs to know about remote work
You could be a company owner or a manager responsible for preparing the company or business for remote working. If you are to do it from scratch, follow these tips to have an amazing remote work experience.
1. Advertise your company or business efficiently
Whether you are an offline employer who wants to expand the business or an online services or solutions provider looking to start remote working, you need to advertise yourself effectively. Reaching a good clientele is the second part. First, you need to acquire the talented recruits to give the solutions your clients need. And to find well-qualified employees, you need to reach out to them. Advertising and marketing play a huge role in this.
Make sure your company or business has a good online presence. Try to brand yourself. Your company need not be world-famous but should have a properly updated website. It should have the required information about your business, services, philosophy, work culture, and employment-related information, and, if possible, client and employee reviews. This makes you appear more professional and more appealing to your clients and future employees.
2. Set clear company policies
If your company is thinking of remote working or planning to hire part-time or full-time remote employees, it is extremely necessary to start with a clear set of company policies. Get to know about the detailed working of your organization and see how it fits in the remote working facility.
Set clear rules and policies that instruct employees about working for the company. Give them a clear idea of what is expected of them on a daily as well as a long-term basis. This gives a structure to the remote working system and enables work-from-home recruiters to hold all the employees with equal standards. Formulate a comprehensive remote working policy. Forbes suggests to include these four points. 1. Cyber-security practices, 2. Protocols during the breach, 3. Clear KPIs and accountability, 4. Expectations of devices and equipment.
Design your own remote work policy based on your company’s ethics, code of conduct, and social norms.
3. Build and promote a positive work culture
Now that you have got the right employees and established order in the company, it is time to grow and let others grow. Promote a positive work environment in the company. Establish respectful remote work, which helps remote workers be trusted and empowered.
Maintain transparency in remote working between the management and the team of workers. Promoting a positive and open work culture will translate into better teamwork in the long run. Your work-from-home headhunters should consider relevant managerial and leadership traits when hiring supervisors and heads of departments so that an appropriate strategy can be implemented to manage a virtual workforce.
4. Provide required training
If your organization requires employees to have a specific skill set, arrange for online training sessions. Doing so will make your remote employees work efficiently. This will provide a perfect opportunity for remote employees to interact with the higher authority and with each other before the actual work begins.
These training sessions need not be conducted at the beginning of the remote working. It can be arranged as and when required. Many remote working companies train their employees, especially in how to remote work efficiently. Such training sessions help immensely to make sure of harmonic workflow practices.
5. Invest in tools of communication
Virtual work or remote work is based on virtual meetings and strong online communication. To get virtual communication right, invest time and money in it.
Investing in virtual communication tools will be the greatest investment you need to make in order to get your remote work started. It may seem like a big investment at first, but as soon as you get a grip on remote working, this will be your biggest asset.
While purchasing premium tools, keep in mind to purchase tools offering basic features like; screen-sharing, recording, and video calling. Applications having these features enable you to make a meeting interactive, as the employees too can easily participate in the discussions and understand the work better.
Additionally, this imbibes a sense of belonging and feels like being in the same room as others. Also, keep other forms of communication equally strong, such as email, social media, etc. There are several options of communication available for common work sharing, delegation, and supervision.
6. Have everything planned
Now, this may sound absurd or irrelevant at first. But imagine working remotely without any kind of planning. Remote work success is dependent on proper planning. In order to work efficiently, have goals planned out. Differentiate the goals into long and short-term goals.
Share these goals and future plans of the company with the remote employees, and plan strategies to achieve the same. Take their opinion on the matter and listen to their suggestions and ideas.
This will help you grow as a company and will also promote personal growth and development. Remote employees will feel a sense of belonging. They feel appreciated, as their opinion is heard and respected.
7. Have strong legal support
Remote working may happen virtually, and not much of it may appear in the non-digital world, but if there is something that you should have physical access to is legal support. If you are a big company going digital, you may want to consider having your very own legal advisors. But if you are a small business majorly working remotely, you need to have legal assistance whenever required. It is probably best to have legal support from nearby, i.e., a lawyer from your own city, a neighboring town, or perhaps someone you know you can trust. This will give you quick access to legal advice whenever required.
When employing remote employees, you may come across frauds too. To steer clear of such people, it is always best to formulate a contract between both parties. It is best to have legal backing to this contract to make the deal more concrete.
While dealing with overseas employees and clients, it is best to have a legal adviser in order to strike negotiations in the deal and to finalize the contract in a way that is acceptable to all. Having legal support is extremely beneficial.
8. Help remote employees get rid of distractions
Remote workers are more susceptible to distraction. Make sure you, as a remote recruiter, know that. Employees have to face a lot of disturbances while working from home.
You could advise your work-from-home employees on how to manage these distractions. Allowing them flexible working hours goes a long way in increasing both productivity and overall work quality and motivation. Also, to enhance the remote working experience, provide your employees the freedom to work whenever they want.
9. Be approachable
Last but the most important thing, be open to any sort of communication. You and your employees form a community interdependent on one another. Be ready to handle problems or any issues related to work. Try to have a friendly relation with the employees while maintaining a professional distance. Understand your employees and help them in times of need.
After all, just because you do not work under one roof does not mean you aren’t a team. Have patience in the initial stages of remote working. Be open to mistakes and encourage your employees to correct them. Support everyone and try to lead the organization in the best way possible.
Conclusion
These were nine easy tips to get your company ready for remote work. If you do not wish to go through the whole process of hunting the right employee, legal work, etc. You can easily outsource it to us.
Alliance Agency is a global recruiting agency with over a decade of experience. We free you from the hassle of finding and recruiting remote employees. Our team of work-from-home head hunters will do the deed for you. All you have to do is contact us as soon as possible and book your free consultation. We also offer all our recruitment services online.
