How Managers Can Ride The Rising Wave Of Remote Working

Imagine, you’re stretched out on a beach under the warm sun, cocktail in hand. *Ping* - an easily dealt-with email from a colleague comes through, and you’re back to sipping your drink. Life at the office isn’t bad.

While the reality of remote working is far from this picture, it is true that increased flexibility can truly make employees feel valued, relaxed and able to focus on their work, with or without a beach backdrop. Whether it’s young talent who work best when typing away from a cafe, or busy parents, hoping to spend some more time with their kids and decrease their commute, flexibility is a valuable priority.

Remote work is, therefore, one of the most desirable benefits a company can offer. And so, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The number of people who work from home has increased by 140% since 2005. Globally right now, 52% of employees work from home at least once a week. This trend is only set to grow more, as, by 2028, 73% of all company departments will contain remote workers.

Managers, in particular, may find that this requires some adaptation in the way that they work and handle their teams. Remote working requires different methods and tools, as well as an established level of trust. It’s possible for managers to feel a little out of control when they first make the shift to managing a remote or partially-remote team. This article aims to lay down some clarity and structure, in order to deal with exactly this.

We’ll now go through the benefits and challenges of remote working, below, and include suggestions on how managers can adapt to the challenges of this changing work environment, ensuring it benefits employees and companies alike.

The Benefits of Home Working, For a Company

There’s a huge range of benefits to remote working, for both managers and employees - ensure you take advantage of these! To us, the most important are:

Employee Happiness and Low Turnover:

First and foremost, studies show that employee happiness is greatly improved by remote working. This is because they experience better work-life balance, less stress, and avoid commuting. The same studies indicate that employees also stay at a company longer when given the opportunity to work remotely. The cost of turnover is well-documented; you could be saving your business thousands by focusing on decreasing turnover via employee happiness strategies. As far as those strategies go, remote working is certainly an effective one.

Lower Overhead Costs:

With less office space required, managers can focus on allocating funding to other areas, instead of renting expensive desk space. Additionally, less office equipment will be required. Depending on the size of your office, you could be saving around $11,000 a year.

Increased Productivity:

Research demonstrates that remote employees regard themselves as more productive, rating themselves a 7.7 out of 10. Office workers rated themselves, on the other hand, at 6.4 out of 10. Indeed, a 13% improvement in employee performance has been measured when people were working remotely over a 9 month period. At home, or their preferred work location, workers are able to tap into their full potential, outputting fantastic results.

Action Plan: How Managers Overcome The Challenges Remote Working Can Present

As with anything in life, those positives don’t come without a negative or two. However, these are challenges that can be overcome using the exact same element which enables remote working in the first place: technology. Here are our top picks:

Visual and Chat Tools for Communication

Often, communication can become complicated when remote working. Sometimes, teams are split across different time zones, or simply have unusual working hours because they organize their time at home differently. However, a centralized, instant communication system such as Slack, Skype, or Teams can really help alleviate this as a problem. The importance of face-to-face communication via video chat also cannot be understated. Dedicated weekly meetings and timeslots should be put in place, as this allows people to check in regularly

Monitoring and Task Management

Trust is a huge part of effectively managing a remote working team. It’s easy to imagine that your team members are off-track, unclear on their tasks, or confused when you’re not there to manage them. Task management tools help you to place some structure and clarity around this. We recommend that you have a task management tool to track work and be sure everyone is on target. Additionally, good digital adoption of project management tools can support this too. Software such as WalkMe is there to support you in this regard, ensuring all employees are using their tools effectively.

Team Spirit

Company culture can be a vital reason why people love working for your firm. It can also motivate them to work hard. When a remote worker’s only interaction with the company is through a computer screen, their team spirit may understandably go down.

As a manager, we recommend that you put in regular time to get to know your remote workers, individually. Ask about their lives, figure out how they work best, and keep them included in company events and information. A monthly “remote worker newsletter”, for example, catching people up on office events, may go a long way. If your remote workers have access to your office location, make sure to put in time and invite them for lunches and in-person meetups.

Support Your Team

Although remote working is a great benefit, people still need support with this non-traditional form of work. Prepare your team and give them helpful, supportive hints on how to stay on-task when working from home. Link to articles and videos, and generally use the wealth of information out there for supporting remote teams.

Set plans for the day and week, with regular check-ins. Ask your team to overcommunicate, in fact! Look into methods such as the Pomodoro method, which means using a timer to break work down into intervals of 25 minutes. Work together with your remote team to encourage fantastic performance, with great support.

Switch Up Your Management Style

As a manager, you will need to have an even closer view of what has been done, what is left to do, and what challenges your employees may be facing. This requires a proactive attitude on your side. Make sure that you are setting aside time in your day for specific check-ins, encouragement and learning sessions.

Overall, however, the benefits of remote working can really drive the success of a business. With this in mind, the required adaptations and changes are simply a part of the wider evolution and growth of your company, as a modern business. In the end, you’ll find yourself with happy, engaged and productive employees, as a result of harnessing the power of technology!