Ultimate guide: how to manage remote teams in 2022

Remote work has become a norm but companies are still learning how to hire and manage remote workers. Remote-first companies should have precise management techniques, interview strategies, and arrangements. This article discusses the steps to building an effective remote team and helps you understand the benefits of hiring a remote team.

This will help you keep on track with time and always know when you should speed up or have time to work on something else. Having a backlog and to-do lists divided makes prioritizing the problems easier and always working on what’s important. Once you get to know your work pace and how much you can do in a certain period of time, you should plan to work on several things that suit 80% of your full capacity. You will dedicate the rest 20% of your time to spontaneous urgent tasks. Every task your team works on, no matter how small it is, should be written down.

• Company culture is a hot topic in remote companies, because it’s much easier to build a culture in co-located teams.
• So if you’re in the business of hiring remote employees, look no further.
• Get the right people in the door with easy-to-post jobs, smart sourcing, and branding.
• As a small business owner, you have probably used Facebook for marketing.
• Not only that, you can also create landing pages for your ads, complete with customized written and video testimonials from your happy team.
• After relying on variations on this style of skill evaluation for more than a decade, Laszlo Bock, the former Google senior V.P.

According to Gartner, 74% of companies are planning for a permanent shift to some degree of remote work. This number is backed up by data from McKinsey, which finds that about 20-25% of the workforces in countries with advanced economies could work from home three to five days a week. That’s at least 400% more remote work than existed before the pandemic. Remote’s own research supports these findings and shows that 81% of workers would move to a new region, state, or country if they could do so without sacrificing their careers.

Set Up Communication Protocols

As we’ve said before, when hiring remote employees, you’re competing with businesses all over the world. The job market has turned upside down, with companies looking for top talent, not workers desperately seeking a job. Hiring remote teams becomes more complicated when including candidates from other countries.

Be sure to schedule meetings monthly or quarterly to provide an update for all. It also sucks time and energy out of people before they even get to the office. But when you work at home, you can start as soon as you wake up.

While this will probably allow the project to proceed faster, it’ll also be hard to have real-time meetings with all team members. You’ll have to figure out some strategies for getting around this issue, like finding the best time in the morning or evening or staggered meeting times. If you’re in a hotbed of developers who you think can handle your project, you probably don’t need to go remote. If that talent isn’t physically close to you, or you need a specialist with a rare skill set, then a remote team might be your only choice.

But if you start your process the other way, and throw up too many barriers too quickly you’ll never know who you’re missing. The best remote software developers aren’t just going to come knocking on your door. Nurture the people at your company with learning, engagement, and performance tools. Get the right people in the door with easy-to-post jobs, smart sourcing, and branding.

Keep your pipeline moving with Video Interviews, a premium one-way screening tool from Workable. Offer location-based compensation that accounts for differences in cost-of-living from country to country. The best résumé-writers aren’t necessarily the best candidates. Before investing money in a paid job ad, don’t hesitate to contact the website to ask about the size and location of their audience. Social media is a great way to amplify your job ad for free, assuming your brand has a decent following. Some platforms, such as LinkedIn, even offer a paid job placement service.

As well as choosing how they work we believe it is important to give people the freedom to pursue new, challenging tasks. Performing the same work each day is a recipe for boredom which affects productivity. Therefore, we encourage people and teams to take on various roles.

Remote workers could be harder to discipline since they’re living halfway across the world. It’s much easier for things to be taken out of context or the wrong way if two people who are talking have been brought up in different regions, with different experiences and perceptions. Even with everything in the cloud, a rogue employee can still download excessive amounts of data maliciously or simply innocently access it in an insecure manner, say on a public network. Making sure your data is secure can be a complicated matter if your employees are halfway across the world. Time Tracking Keep projects on track and budget with the most definitive proof of work. By sending this form I confirm that I have read and accepted the Softermii Privacy Policy.

What is a remote team?

Organizations benefit from increased employee retention, cost savings , increased productivity, and access to much larger talent pools. Through these meetings, you must update your team about the developments and resolve pending problems. You should also use this venue to plan for the upcoming week.

Instead, design a value-add application process that educates candidates about the position while simultaneously educating the interviewing team about the candidate. While it’s easy to get stuck in the land of operational management, don’t forget about your how to hire a remote team strategic goals. To measure your success, hold everyone accountable and set up the appropriate KPIs. Keep them clear and transparent so not only you but everyone on your team know exactly how it’s going and come up with new ideas on how to do better.

No amount of communication tools will replace the daily interaction you have when you work in an office, thus remote work requires some getting used to. If the candidate has prior remote experience, it’s great, but usually that’s not the case. I prefer talking with candidates openly about all ups and downs of remote work during the hiring process. The reactions and feedback I get when I talk about the ups/downs are important.

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And having a group of employees who come from varying backgrounds results in truly great ideas. Despite the resistance, hiring remote workers is going to become far more common. No hiring process is complete or valid without a legal work contract.

Below, we discuss a handful of the major challenges of global hiring. Later, we discuss how hiring with an employer of record helps companies tap into a global talent pool and overcome these challenges. Having a solid reputation will make it easier to hire talented people and retain them. If you’re hiring local employees, it won’t be hard to get the word out about your company, and they might already have heard about or seen your office.

Schedule regular check-ins with their managers and encourage coworkers to set up virtual get-to-know-you sessions.

This can be anything from a portfolio to links to their previous work. You want self-starters who can see a need and then take the appropriate https://globalcloudteam.com/ actions without having to be told what to do. Save meeting prep time, get everyone talking and evolve as a team – all in one tool.

Therefore, your brand as an employer online is especially important in attracting talents. Your brand as an employer, in most cases, is like the company’s brand, but it is the reputation you have among the labor force and how your employees perceive you. The once-limited advantage of professions, such as tech, has become a mainstay for many in varied occupations. The remaining 3% wanted to return to full-time office work. However, this is not a new phenomenon; people have worked from remote locations for decades. The number of remote workers in the USA alone increased by 159% between 2005 and 2017.

Manage your work from home employees and remote workers.

Their ability to communicate in your local language is important if the employee will be customer-facing or if you need a lot of collaboration with other team members. You should also consider having an effective LinkedIn presence as well for both yourself and your business. You should be open to hiring both experienced and new freelancers on Upwork in order to find the right talent at a good price.

Create ideal remote employee profile

As noted above, these interview questions can be combined with elements of the skills test measuring remote working skills such as communication and collaboration. Instead, an online interview can be used to explore cultural fit, working style, career goals, and allow the candidate to ask plenty of questions. If the candidate has scored poorly in a particular area of the skills test, use this time to dive deeper into that area and discover why. If you have already conducted an online skills assessment, you should have confidence that all of your shortlisted candidates can do the job.

Make it clear that advertised jobs are remote-friendly

Zoom – As a remote team we don’t often get to sit around a table together when we meet but using Zoom for our video calls has meant this is not a problem. When welcoming new telecommuters, you should try and have as much face-to-face time as possible with them. They should be included in meetings, meet the team through a video conference, and get acquainted with everyone’s roles. However, if you prefer using traditional platforms for job seekers, you can always post a remote job there, or even look for talent on LinkedIn. Employees love remote work because it gives them flexibility.

Hire your ideal remote employee

If you’re not sure exactly what you want, take a look at marketplaces like Fiverr where freelancers list their services and you can choose the best one for your needs. Remote workers have more autonomy than traditional workers, they value the opportunity to have more say on the work they take on. Freelancers are well within their rights to turn down work they don’t want and often work for multiple clients. I initially shared these thoughts at the Change at Work conference by NOBL, here’s the full video and transcript. As with the entirety of our product and company, this process is always a work in progress.