Online business is trending today. Many companies are transitioning their employees to remote work. It is essential to organize everything correctly so as not to lose contact with your remote team.
Numerous business owners believe that employees work effectively only in the office. In practice, you can organize productive work remotely. More and more companies, online businesses, including large ones, are doing this and giving preference to a remote team.
However, freelancers, full-time and part-time employees working remotely from home often don’t fully understand their role in the project and can’t appreciate their contribution to the common cause. To work effectively, they need to become full-fledged team players, maximally involved in the project and the life of your enterprise. So the main task for you as a business owner — organize work with maximum productivity and use all kinds of tools for business for a comfortable workflow.
For any company, remote work is a chance to test a new format and save a lot by tracking all expenses. Managers can see the productivity of each specialist, and employees can make sure they understand their role and goals in the company correctly.
In this article, we are going to give some tips for business owners on how to maximize their remote team productivity and take their online business to the next level. Let’s go!
1. Set a work schedule
Whether you are transitioning your employees to a remote work format, starting an online business, or recruiting a remote team from scratch, you need to define your work schedule clearly.
It all depends on the type of your activity. For instance, your company operates during regular business hours, so you need to explain to employees that they must perform their tasks and be in touch at this very time. It’s crucial to define that working from home is the same responsibility as before, just remote. They must adhere to the timetable, for example, beginning work at 8:00 a.m. and ending at 5 p.m.
If your business doesn’t need a clear schedule and you don’t care what time your employees start and finish work, it is enough to explain to them that they must complete tasks on time, meet deadlines, and be aware of up-to-date information in the team workspace.
2. Organize communication in a remote team
It is an extremely essential tip for business owners to keep in mind when organizing a remote workflow. Employees can often feel lonely without the usual communication with colleagues. It can lead to a decrease in engagement and productivity.
Therefore, constant interaction through various communication channels is so significant. When colleagues see each other’s activity and the overall result of the work, it’s easier for them to focus on tasks and resolve all emerging problems as soon as possible. Today, the market offers numerous communication tools for business that will help you work from home efficiently.
3. Provide all necessary equipment
The next tip for business owners on our list is the necessity to provide the remote team with all the essential equipment. Your employees must have all the required software and equipment to effectively complete their tasks — from laptops and headphones to task managers at least like Trello and merge PDF tool by PDFChef.
There are a huge number of applications and tools for businesses to organize and control the process and remote team performance. Without them, it is impossible to work and achieve your goals. It is also worth taking care of technical specialists who will help set up apps, explain how to use the remote desktop, and provide ongoing technical support.
4. Take care of data security
Information security is a separate issue for any business owner when organizing a remote workflow. The threat of information leakage when working from home is quite high since the specialists responsible for data security can’t fully ensure this security as in the office.
The use of untrusted data transmission channels and insufficiently protected devices can lead to corporate data leakage. Therefore, it’s so critical to provide online business data security and explain the basics to employees (the elementary use of strong passwords and VPN connections when using public Wi-Fi).
To strengthen security measures, periodically change electronic keys and passwords. If you fire employees or change their duties, change all passwords to which they had access, and make sure that they handed over all electronic media.
5. Stay in touch and support your team
As an online business owner, you must constantly be in touch with your remote team and provide feedback on all issues and tasks. It is useful to provide moral and psychological support to employees, as well as to motivate them. Don’t allow situations when you have no interaction with one of the employees for an extended period of time.
Hold regular Zoom meetings, respond to emails, comment on emerging questions, and clearly delegate tasks. If you find it hard to communicate at a distance, use a screen recorder to explain the task or give specific instructions and explanations for completing the project.
It won’t be superfluous to consider a bonus system so that your employees realize their significance. Simple gratitude can also lift the spirits of your workers and motivate them to perform well.
6. Solve financial issues
It’s essential to think over all the points in advance to avoid problems with the salary when organizing the work of your remote team. Your employees may be from different countries, which may cause them problems getting paid.
Take care of an uninterrupted salary system in advance! Your remote team should have an accounting department that will control your financial flows and track the process of paying salaries to the staff. If you have a small online business, you can do without special software and perform all the calculations in an Excel spreadsheet. It will be enough.
7. Remember about training and professional development
Constantly develop your employees. Use video conferencing to share knowledge within the same organization, plan a series of webinars with guest speakers, or take advantage of ready-made courses. It will help to build your remote team.
Today, almost all organizers of seminars and courses have already switched to the virtual world. Therefore, the team can easily learn and master new facets of your business with remote access. Distance learning is a great team-building activity and an opportunity to improve hard and soft skills, saving on organizing an event.
Conclusion
A feature of remote work is that employees need more feedback and support from their managers. When thinking about how to organize a remote team, it’s vital to pay attention not only to the technical part but also to the moral aspects of working from home.
We have given you some tips for business owners on making your employees’ work from home as convenient and productive as possible. We wish you all the best and take your online business to the next level!
