Feeling safe while delegating remote work

"My employees have never worked remotely! I don't believe they will ever work effectively from home."

Switching to remote work can be a real cause for concern. It can be scary, especially for people managing the budget of their own companies, who feel the real burden of financial responsibility for potential frauds, delays, wasted time or weak final results.

A jump into the deep end.

How to ensure the company will survive while working remotely? The best way is to apply proven methods and ask for trusted advice from practitioners. Below you can find several ideas that may be helpful for feeling safe while delegating remote work.

How to delegate and settle tasks carried out remotely?

Several proven and working tactics for beginners:

Delegation of tasks and projects

* We do not monitor the number of hours spent, but deadlines and final results.

* We try to divide large tasks into verifiable parts, large projects - into smaller verifiable stages and delegate tasks that are no longer than a week.

* Goals and tasks can be delegated both in words and online, in one of many tools and systems for project or task management.

Time estimation

* We ask for estimates. As long as the tasks we delegate are large enough that it makes sense:

1) We ask the employee how much time it will take for him to do a given task and we keep in mind or write down this estimate.

2) In the meantime - while the task is being performed - we ask if there are any problems with its completion. We solve problems on an ongoing basis, so as not to delay work. Daily meetings from the Scrum methodology can help with detecting problems.

3) If there are no problems, we expect the task to be done within a previously established time - and we simply check its result, whether it's consistent with the arrangements and whether it has the desired high quality.

4) If he doesn't complete it on time and didn't say earlier that he has problems, then we know that something is wrong.

It's noteworthy that no additional "trust" is needed in this process. Of course, it's useful for the manager to have domain knowledge and know approximately how much time it takes to perform a given type of work - to control the length of estimates/the estimated time of task completion proposed by a given employee.

Delegation of ongoing work

* Some work involves performing a large number of various tasks that cannot be delegated one by one, and their results accepted on an ongoing basis. If we have a need for control, we can set quantitative goals + check the quality of work at random.

For example goals for a recruiter: make X phone calls to candidates per week, obtain Y contracts per month. To this, we add e.g. a question about the most problematic situations that have occurred on a given day - and solving them on a regular basis in the daily mode or creating solutions for the future.

Remote work for junior staff

The junior employees are often unable to organize an effective work environment for themselves. Additionally, they may face more discouragement as a result of unsolved problems caused by a lack of expertise. The newcomers are especially exposed to mental barriers related to asking for help.

* We give autonomy to more experienced employees - less experienced ones will require more help.

* We teach the beginners that asking for help on their own initiative is a part of their duties. Make sure they actively reach out to more experienced employees designated for this purpose.

Performance audit

* If up till now the manager would walk around and make sure that the employees are working, not knowing what final results he expects from them and when - then he may have been wasting time. If the manager had the habit of walking among employees to monitor them or to take care of their good mood - he can do the same with remote work, by contacting them online.

* If we don't check the work results in a stationary job on an ongoing basis, e.g. because we rely on the opinions of other employees about the quality of work of a given person - then we can do the same just as well in regards to the remote work.

* Long-term, tiring, difficult tasks - it's worth paying special attention to monitoring these kinds of tasks. Such tasks can exhaust the patience of even very experienced employees if leave them on their own. It's much harder to mobilize ourselves to perform them on our own while working from home. Therefore, they will require more attention and encouragement from the management side.

* Another way is to organize work in such a way that some employees need the result of their colleagues' work to achieve their goals. Then, they monitor each other, reminding themselves and asking when given work will be done - so they are able to perform their own tasks on time. We can achieve this by directly designating people who are responsible for performing a given type or stage of work in a business process.

Summary

It's worth assuming that in regard to the remote work, the manager will need to put in more work than before to ensure that the whole system is working fluently. Whereas, in daily remote management, it's worth paying more attention to the team, among others to proactively identify problems that will arise - and sustain team morale.