Do You Need To Adjust In Remote Working?
📖 LearningRemote working has pulled up its sock over last years and there’s been a growth in working remotely. And now, Coronavirus has forced untold employees and teams to work from home arrangement, and is mandated to work from home is disorienting at best, and debilitating at worst. For employees who are fastening their new remote reality, they need to learn to adjust in remote working.
If you are a founder or a team leader, then you have to manage a remote team that should be employee focussed remote working.
Remember that transitioning to a remote environment, even if it’s temporary, is a process. You cannot copy an in-office environment and paste it into a remote work; that too from home one, and expect everyone to function as usual.
It can be hard to understand what other of your workers are currently going through when they are remotely working, especially when you haven’t worked remotely ever before. They are facing many problems like, that they might have looped out of normal office communication. However, that’s not the only limitation. Other challenges could be that they don’t have to deal with clients and some would have been just unplugging at the end of the day.
If we look into the insights, then it might help break through major issues while working remotely and support their team. What are the major challenges to remote teams? This has to get over with, to work efficiently.
Challenges of Managing A Remote Team
- Having employees across multiple time zones
- Lacking the right communication tools
- Missing accountability systems
- Failing to have clear roles and tasks
- Remembering remote workers for promotions
- Remote hiring is like rolling two fours
If we look at it imperatively, then the biggest challenge is how to manage the above-mentioned challenges. Effectively managing a remote team is a challenge for every manager. Keeping everyone in sync not only requires an extra effort but often cuts into valuable time.
Adjust in Remote Working
1. Establish A Structure
The dreaded routine becomes a lifesaver when the person you are working with is not sitting in the same building. Frequent check-ins and a transparent way of monitoring progress will take away at least part of the anxiety caused by a lack of personal interest.
2. Speed-Up Onboarding
You won’t be available all the time to answer questions and with the time you’ll realize the majority of the team stays the same. If so, try to solve underlying issues. Provide guidelines & checkpoints so clear work can be done with your help.
3. Recognize The Power Of CC
Keep everybody in the loop. In a remote environment, any form of alienation can easily invoke a sentiment of exclusion.
4. Put Emphasis On Result
Don’t mistake online presence for productivity. Sometimes people do have a habit to be a night owl and work hard, so they might not be able to give their full productivity in the day time. If the result is good, then don’t destroy that thing with your harsh behavior towards it.
5. Brainstorm Together
The usual tasks can be taken care of remotely, but to really get a creative discussion flowing, bring the team together.
6. Foster Transparency
Collaborate online and pool resources in one place. However, try to adjust the level of transparency so that it doesn’t clash with your coworkers’ work styles.
7. Make Yourself Available
The sheer number of communication channels leaves no excuse for being unavailable. Don’t play hide and seek, be clear how and when people can quickly reach you.
8. Match The Medium With The Message
Email might not be the perfect solution for a quick-paced back-and-worth conversation. Consider using chat or a video call.
9. Plan Absences In Advance
In the case of co-located teams, it’s easy to adjust to a surprise absence on the fly. It takes some more time and effort to reassign and coordinate remote work in the same situation.
10. Balance Communication
Ever shared a room with a coworker who defined the wrong side of the signal to noise ratio? While communication in a remote environment is paramount, omnipresent notifications are the bane of our digital age. Try to limit the number of distractions your colleagues will have to respond to.
You Need the Right Tools
You need the right tools because remote working comes with risks and threats. The idea of doing work at home without exhaustive preparation would have seemed laughable a decade or two ago. But the power of cloud and automation has brought the prospect of remote working within reach for many organizations.
If your business is already working with a cloud-based solution, the transition to remote working should be relatively simple. (If you’re not so lucky, now might be a good time to start considering it.)
These tools help facilitate the practice of remote working:
- Dynamics 365 Business Central (an accounting and ERP solution)
- Office 365 Suite (in addition to documents and spreadsheets, Office also has Teams — a powerful collaboration tool)
- Power Apps (lets you create your own applications with little or no code)
- Azure Server Hosting (now includes virtual workstations, allowing you to use your workstations without being at your desk)
- Power Automate (helps create workflows to streamline tasks and processes)
- Forms (create online forms to collect data and get alerts)
It's important to communicate with your team as you adjust, speak up about issues, offer solutions for communication gaps, seek advice on how others have carved out dedicated places of work within their home. Crowdsource advice from within your organization. Look for the opportunity in the midst of what will feel like a chaotic and destabilized situation.
Remote is a chance to rethink how you live and work, and though it may sound counterintuitive, unleashing your imagination to take advantage of your new working reality may lead to long-term efficiencies. You have to try and adapt a self-service and self-learning mentality because, in the end, this is how things are going to work effectively.
After all, It’s you not them, which counts.
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