10 Common Remote Work Challenges + Solutions

Examine the different benefits available to help employees cope. I’ll be the first to admit that my natural motivation is probably weaker than average. If it’s not, then it certainly feels like it when I see how well other remote workers I now appear to naturally maintain levels of motivation. In terms of maximising productivity, the first thing you want to know is how long tasks are taking. Slack has established itself as the go-to communication platform for remote teams – and for good reason. In this article, we’re going to look at ten of the most common remote work challenges and solutions to overcome them.

Team members can see what everyone else is currently working on, what they got up to yesterday, their availability status and any “blockers” that are getting in the way of completing tasks. This means no interruptions when people are working on something important and a reduction in pointless messages like “Are you available now? Our design team uses InVision to create and mockups, provide feedback and test interactive demos without any specialist design software.

A lot of the time they will work longer hours, or have more haphazards schedules, especially if they work from home. They often feel the pressure of having to work harder to prove themselves, neglecting their private life. A lot of managers and CEOs have this misconception that working from home is easier and makes employees more accessible. We don’t have dedicated hours you need to work and we’re not using team time-tracking or screen monitoring tools. It’s about what you produce, not how many hours it took you or whether you did it at 6am or 6pm. As a proxy for trust and may not in fact have a deeper ethic of trust within teams.

Trusting one another is no easy feat in personal life, let alone at work, when our livelihood and career reputation are on the line. However, practicing open communication, showing vulnerability, care, and the willingness to admit mistakes and publicly learn from them already goes a long way. As we’ve seen, trust is more than delivering tasks on time, especially remotely, when you see your coworkers through their profile pictures and words on a screen. Learning about each other, helping and knowing we are a part of something larger than us is bound to overcome any physical distance. Remote employees don’t have access to serendipitous opportunities to physically spend time with coworkers, like having lunch or going out for ice cream or happy hour. Trust as the head of the team/team manager demands that you are supportive, and at all costs, avoid micro-managing.

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The importance of building trust communication in your team can never be overemphasized. In-fact, trust must be built at all levels or sectors of your team. Building trust communication in your team helps simplify team leadership, motivation, relationship, coaching, and motivation. An enabling environment for a trusted interaction brings about transparency and mutual respect for the parties involved.

• Instead, you get them used to trusting the process and that they can overcome a problem by working together.
• If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.
• These are based on the challenges we’ve experienced here at Venture Harbour, my own experiences as a remote worker and the challenges listed in numerous studies on remote working.
• Other opportunities on Slack exist, like the app Icebreakers, or having a dedicated channel to share music.
• I need to collect feedback from my team to make myself the best leader I can be and to be able to give feedback to them.

People working from home or on the move face their own unique set of challenges when it comes to getting things done and fitting work into their personal lives. If that doesn’t work, you may have to discourage all sweeping statements about these topics and keep conversations on more professional subjects. They don’t really give you live feedback or tell you how productive team members are being while they work on tasks. In many ways, Slack is the simplest collaboration tool your team and this is credit to how good a job it does of simplifying communications essentials. A lot of studies have been conducted on remote working in recent years, listing the benefits for all involved.

“As individuals, we view transparency as a lifestyle of authenticity and honesty. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. I have a photographic memory, which helps me hunt down Slack messages even from six months ago. That helps me when delivering feedback, so I can back up previously discussed items with their own words.

How Can You Measure Trust In A Virtual Team?

This makes their work interesting and challenging, and engineers tend to prefer that. I alternate between bringing up two topics of career development in my one-on-one meetings. One topic is whether my reports enjoy the work and the opportunities that they have.

Anything that gets people out of their homes and interacting with other people will lower their mental-health risk. These interactions help employees feel connected to one another and to the company and its mission. Most companies using Slack or other chat apps have #random, #fun, #music, #books and a host of other interest-based channels where people can visit and chat about non-work things they share in common. Specific teams can host their own “brown bag” or learning-focused sessions where someone presents on a specific topic of interest that they’ve been working on. Buffer does casual calls in pairs or threes, using an automated bot for Slack that sets up “donut chats.” Upworthy does this with “serendipity calls,” and there’s also HeyTaco!

This allows team managers to decide whether that task is too important to interrupt. Ideally, you want the key members of your team to have a fairly regular schedule. It doesn’t necessarily matter when they choose to work, as long as they’re consistent so you generally know when they’re next going to be available. Whether they decide to work specific hours every week or schedule availability time for the week ahead, you generally want to know who is going to be available on a weekly basis. You can also discover which tasks individual team members are most time-efficient with, allowing you to assign tasks to the most suitable person. The first thing you need for remote collaboration is an effective communication channel.

Whats The Difference Between Building Trust In A Virtual Team Compared To An Office Environment?

Distributed work requires that organizations free themselves of this notion. By definition, the organization must trust that work will happen when they can’t watch. Not trusting your employees will not only cost you as you build structures and processes for compliance; it will erode engagement, productivity, and the quality of outcomes. To build a modern company, it’s imperative that you free yourself from archaic notions of how work is supposed to happen. This means retiring the physical, virtual, and mental punch cards, and working on giving employees clear goals, healthy communication practices, and a thriving collaborative environment. People easily jump to questioning the commitment or time management skills of others.

Even group meetings and collaboration sessions can be set at times suitable for everyone in a matter of clicks. Starting right at the top, the biggest challenge with remote working is managing projects when your team is spread out across multiple locations. Whether it’s a mix of in-house and remote staff or an entire team of remote workers, managers are https://globalcloudteam.com/ responsible for making sure deadlines are met and targets are hit. Of course, it goes without saying that it’s best to find tools that are affordable, but not completely free. Employees notice when a CEO is taking advantage of free platforms, and oftentimes the free plans aren’t scalable for larger companies, which only makes their jobs difficult.

The value of this feedback isn’t in the collection of it, but is rather in the action that follows it. Once the company knows about any problems, it faces the choice of acting on them to maintain trust and improve engagement of their workforce, or risking eroding what trust they do have. I explained that I used to be in their place with little direction from leadership, because the connective tissue of frontline management was missing. The goal was to align the team, so I could advocate for us to leadership.

I’m working on implementing peer feedback into our engineering culture. Some feedback doesn’t have to come from me, since I’m not equipped with the necessary information on the technical side. Managers tend to praise firefighting, solving unexpected incidents. I’m making an effort to shift the conversations towards celebrating people who build fireproof architectures. Not having problems in the first place beats solving them, so I aim to reward that as well. I prefer going to my reports with concrete information rather than updates on discussions that may change by next week.

Performance Reviews

They know who I am as a person and understand my principles in decision making so they can be productive even when I’m not present. Building a self-managed team stops the leader from becoming a bottleneck for the team. I’ve invested a lot in my team and in those relationships over the past year, and it’s paying off as we scale the team. Also, every participant can have distractions happen during a call individually, making it hard for them to keep up with the discussion. I consider trust in the workplace a continuously evolving concept driven by individuals.

What’s turns someone on might be a big turn-off for someone else. Therefore, building trust in a remote team should be based on the peculiarities and the individualistic traits of each worker. Another age-long and rampant difficulties in building trust are that most employees, oftentimes, have mistaken Micro-managing for effective monitoring and supervision of employees.

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I put effort into coaching my team to understand the leadership’s position. I assure them that we’re working on a strategy, and I’ll make sure to update them when we have a plan to execute. Their reaction lets you know how much they trust the organization. The denominator of the trust equation is that the amount of trust depends on what you see other people trying to do for their self-interest. This causes most of the miscommunication in technical discussions.

Companies may improve their workplace culture by setting clear goals and addressing managerial biases linked to remote employment. This is another reason it helps to have statuses on apps like Slack and Status Hero so people can see when you are/aren’t available. Making your availability hours known to everyone is important, too. Make people aware that you’re available for work-related issues at specific times and, equally important, make it clear that you’re not available outside of those times.

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I can’t put the same amount of effort into my relationships with a bigger team. For now, I’m managing individual contributors, but soon I may be managing managers. Trust keeps us functioning in phases when we have less face time. It comes down to How to Hire a Remote Team giving people feedback the way they prefer it based on their personality types. You can give anyone praise in a one-on-one situation, but it’s not obvious that they want you to announce that in front of hundreds of people in an all-hands meeting.

Culture Evolves As A Company Growsshare Section

Honestly, either platform is a great choice and there are plenty of other options on the market like Trello designed for teams with less demanding needs. Who covers the expenses of remote work – the employer or the remote employee? How to start freelancing (even when working full-time) Actionable advice showing how to start freelancing in a particular industry, even when you have a full-time job…. HR platforms, to give your HR department access to more information, and your employees a place to get to know each other, etc. Making sure that your team is equipped with digital systems needed for remote work will ensure the efficacy of the team.

How To Build Trust In The Remote Workplace

But in the case of a remote team that operates virtually, Team Leadership, Communication, Employee Engagement, and Motivation will be much more tedious due to a variety of reasons. Lastly, building trust as the head of the organization/ the employer starts first with having an honest and transparent hiring process. For an employer, building trust communication with your employees starts first from the hiring process. The impression made in the mind of an employee at this stage flows through to other stages of the work. For remote workers, a trusted employee communication might be quite hard at first, but it is very much important, and as such, will require effort.

Marijana Stojanovic is an experienced writer with a passion for self-improvement techniques and apps. It’s what keeps them moving forward, even if they don’t feel up to the task. Remote workers in particular, as they have no way to see you in person, and gauge your reactions to them.

An engineer may feel like another person is trying to push their own agenda. You have opportunities to connect with individuals, but group interactions are challenging. The difficult part is earning trust and repairing it if it breaks. Once you’ve established it, it’s rewarding as trust provides you the support you need from your colleagues. This is essential because you spend a large part of your days together. In my definition, trust at the workplace is the level of credibility you see in your colleagues and your organization.

For example, if a coworker is five minutes late for a meeting, the thought that this person is just lazy and doesn’t respect your time is likely to cross your mind. It’s not obvious to instinctively respect everyone’s personal lives, and it’s easier to assume that they aren’t doing their part in a remote environment. Train managers to recognize their own unconscious biases to build a fair system that employees trust. Aim for objectivity in performance evaluation and promotion criteria to avoid penalizing remote workers.

You need to be genuine and consistent with your verbal commitments. You can’t promise something to one of your direct reports in a one-on-one and do the opposite in a team meeting the next week. Something can happen off camera that puts a mixed expression on my face that can be misinterpreted by the person on the other side – or the other way around. Leaders must define expectations for remote staff, ranging from how frequently to check in to using a virtual or phone message. You may use this guide to illustrate your company’s stance toward remote work to potential workers. Here we’ve rounded up our pick of the best software to track spend, ROI & more.