Bringing together a remote workforce is a perfect way of saving money for your business. Remote workers have far fewer costs attached to them – compared to full-time employees that come to work in your office. One of the many benefits is that you don’t even need an office, which saves a fortune on monthly rent/expenses.
There are other benefits, but that’s a different article for a different day. Today, we’ll address a key issue some business owners have with a remote workforce; managing them effectively. When your workers are in different places, it can be hard to enforce productivity and get them working well. Not only that, but you could encounter issues with certain daily tasks. So, here are some secrets to help you manage your remote workforce with ease.
Hire People In Similar Time Zones
Naturally, when you hire a remote workforce, you pretty much open your doors to anyone, anywhere. This throws up one key problem; time zones. It’s much harder to manage a workforce when half the people are operating in a completely different time zone. When it’s morning for half your team, the other team are working in the dead of night. Personally, I think you should make life easier for yourself by hiring people in similar time zones. You’re looking for a couple of hours difference max, or else it gets too confusing and hard to control. When people are all in the same time zones, it makes communication easier, and you can run a tighter ship.
Develop Web Apps
When you have employees in an office, you can buy computers with applications installed on them. However, when your employees work from home, they all have different computers with different software on them. To counter this, you need to consider custom web application development. This idea means you develop your own web apps that your employees can access from any computer with an internet connection. It makes life a lot easier, while also providing them with a way to work together within the apps. All their work gets saved in the cloud, meaning you can look at it and work with them too. It’s much easier than trying to get everyone to download certain office software to do their work on!
Keep Everyone In The Loop
One of the toughest things for remote workers to deal with is a lack of communication from superiors. They want to be kept in the loop at all times, to understand what’s going on. If you get them to do things a certain way, but then something comes up, and you have to change your approach, you need to communicate this to them. You can’t just suddenly say that things have to change, not unless you offer an explanation. Otherwise, your workers will become unhappy, and their work output will decrease. When everyone knows what’s happening, and why it’s happening, then the whole company just flows better.
So, the secret to managing a remote workforce is to follow these three tips! If you learn how to manage remote employees properly, then they’ll bring so many benefits for your business.