The COVID-19 pandemic has crippled the whole world. Countries around the world had to initiate the blockade to curb the spread of this virus, but at the same time it hit several companies and millions of jobs were compromised. To withstand these difficult times, organizations have had to abandon their conventional business model and embrace the online method aided by cloud technology.
The concept of remote teams originated in general, and various tools have flooded the Internet to help them collaborate in real-time. By implementing these tools, organizations have been able to maintain their operations even in the midst of the ongoing crisis and have saved millions of people from losing their livelihoods. However, managing remote teams is by no means an easy task. While things seem to be heading in the right direction, there are several obstacles that you as an employer you cannot afford to ignore as an employer.
These issues hurt the performance of your remote employees and if they are not on time can lead to a retirement, which is really not desirable for a growing company.
In this article, I will therefore help you identify some of these issues and also explain ways to reduce them to maintain a healthy work culture, even if your employees work remotely.
1. The Feeling of Being Alone
As social beings and we like to be around people with whom we can share our thoughts, have fun, and spend time with them. However, the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home and has disrupted our social connections leaving us feeling isolated.
The same also happens with employees, staying away from their usual work environment and peers contributes to their sense of isolation. This has a profound impact on their commitment to work and also takes a toll on their mental health and emotional health.
As an employer who now leads an remote team, you must take all necessary measures to avoid this problem. One way to alleviate this problem is to create a virtual community for your employees and encourage them to communicate about it. Let your employees have informal conversations with their peers, as they often do in the workplace. This will help them strengthen their professional ties, even if they are not close, and will keep them motivated in the long term.
2. Reduced motivation due to late recognition
As of today, employees value recognition for their achievements than a decent salary. When they know their contributions are recognized, they feel relieved, which ignites their zeal to achieve even better results.
However, most employers lack the planning or the right tools to immediately recognize their remote employees. When employees are not recognized for a long time, they tend to lose their interest in their work. Moreover, it increases the risk of employee turnover, with organizations often losing their best talents.
The answer to this problem is now in the form of various cloud-based employee recognition and reward systems. Such a system allows employers to recognize and reward employees regardless of their position. Most of these systems also allow peer appreciation, which is essential for stimulating team spirit.
3. Ensuring the welfare of remote employees
Employee well-being is becoming a concern for employers around the world. Especially at times like these, ensuring that your employees stay healthy and fit should be a top priority on your management checklist.
Because workers hardly walk around or engage in physical activity, they are more prone to a variety of health problems than ever. But having some kind of employee wellness program coupled with meaningful incentive can help your employees here. These programs are designed to encourage employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle to increase their productivity.
Even if your employees work remotely, they shouldn’t miss out on such programs. The same cloud technology that supports remote working also lets you tackle virtual health challenges that can be easily accomplished within the comfort of their home.
4. Create a strong communications regime
The effectiveness of your remote team largely depends on the quality of the communication they maintain with their peers and the management. Since they are all spread out in different places, you need to make sure that they are in sync with each other. Unlike in the office, you can’t just talk to employees and pass on information. You need to make sure that everyone is able to receive and send real-time information for which different tools are now available.
5. Flexibility
Most people working from home, they now have to juggle between work and private life at the same time. Keeping employees busy with work thinking that they can only do it because they are at home would be very wrong. At the same time, you must allow them some flexibility in work timing so that they can do their homework so that they don’t have anything to worry about anything while they are working.
Doing this really keeps your employees engaged and can also enjoy a good work-life balance.
6. Building Team Work
Teamwork is another thing that is most affected when your employees operate with separation from each other. When you let employees work remotely, they miss the human connection with their colleagues which is very essential for building teamwork. For this reason, organizations organize various team building activities to develop the bond between employees. However, you can still build relationships and rekindle team spirit within your remote workers by hosting remote team building activities that now help employers keep everyone connected.
7. Performance Management
Another issue you need to keep in check. Since they are not near you, measuring their efficiency becomes complicated. And if these matters are not dealt with in a timely manner, they could negatively impact everyone’s productivity leading to a slowdown in the company’s growth.
To address this issue and accurately track your employees’ performance, you can adopt the agile methodology with the concept of OKRs and scrum. Scrum is the short daily meeting that takes place at the start to include team members so everyone is aware of each other’s progress and if they run into obstacles. On the other hand, the OKRs are monthly meetings to track the progress of each employee in the team. Both can be easily implemented with online communication tools and will certainly simplify the performance management task considerably.
