In the modern world, more and more people have found themselves working from home. For managers and business owners, this has presented a whole host of opportunities, but there are also plenty of challenges that need to be discussed as well. It is these challenges that are going to be looked at in detail in the following blog post. When you are fully aware of the challenges you are facing, it is much more likely that you will be able to overcome them successfully.
Instilling a Company Culture
No matter the size of your organization, you are bound to develop a culture of some description. When everyone is in a single location, it tends to be a lot easier to manage this successfully. However, when you have a scattered team, the company culture can move out of your level of control somewhat. Therefore, you need to be especially careful with your hiring policy, ensuring that everybody you bring on board fits in with your company and everything that it is trying to achieve.
Collaboration and Teamwork
While the modern world has brought a whole host of new communication methods with it, there can still be many issues that arise regarding collaboration and teamwork. Keeping in close contact is absolutely vital, as is establishing the communication channels that work best for your organization. As well as the tasks that you need to accomplish at your organization, you may also want to arrange the kind of team-building days that seriously help when it comes to bringing you all working together in a sense of harmony.
Training and Development
As long as your staff members are working for you, it is important that you do everything possible to train and develop them to reach their highest level. Using elearning to support remote workers from Wahoo Learning can help to offer a sense of structure to these training activities. There are so many online programs out there, and they all have the advantage of being traceable, so you can see who has completed them and how seriously they have been taken.
Motivation and Productivity
For many people, working from home is an entirely new concept. As such, some people are bound to be better at it than others. Some people will be excellent with regards to self-motivation, whereas others are going to need nudging in the right direction from time to time. Ultimately, establishing a culture of openness and honesty can certainly help in this regard. If people are struggling to work from home effectively, you want them to feel comfortable coming to you and explaining what sort of issues they are encountering and the type of support that you can offer to help out.
Task Management
The next issue is related to take management. Part of this comes back to good communication and ensuring that everybody is fully aware of their responsibilities at all times. Also, this means that you have good managers in place who can always ensure that everybody is fully on board with what they are doing. As a manager or a business owner, it certainly makes your life an awful lot easier if you feel comfortable delegating tasks to your staff members and knowing that they will come back completed to a high standard.
Technical Issues
As you do not have an IT team on site, this can present a major issue when it comes to overcoming technical issues when people are working from home. Of course, if you have an IT professional who is used to working with team members remotely, this can make your task an awful lot easier. Also, this comes back to good training – particularly with members of staff who struggle with technical issues.
Trusting Your Team
If you have worked with your team for a long time, you already may have a high level of trust in them and do not have to worry about micro-managing. However, when you are bringing on new members of staff, this can present a particular challenge when it comes to trust. Coming up with comprehensive hiring and onboarding processes is bound to help you out in a significant way. So, now is the time to do this.
Of course, some of these challenges are going to be ongoing, but if you can get a handle on them early, this can help you to manage your remote team with a lot more ease and flair, making them more productive and satisfied.
