As the popularity of remote work increases, businesses must create efficient procedures for remote workers. These mechanisms are essential for ensuring that remote workers are efficient, motivated, and capable of working well with their coworkers. The most effective methods for developing remote worker solutions that foster collaboration and productivity will be covered in this article.
But first, what systems are we referring to in these cases?
Systems for remote workers are ways of doing things at your workplace, which are put in place to ensure that work moves smoothly and continuously with consistent results. You must provide employees know these systems to reference them when stuck quickly. In addition, you should put these systems in place to ensure your employees have the best support system to empower them in their daily duties.
Tips For Creating Systems For Remote Workers
Part of our job at HireMango is to help clients get the best talents in the global job market. On top of that, we sometimes advise clients on the strategies they need to implement to ensure they are getting maximum productivity from their remote employees. Here are some tips for creating systems for remote workers that have shown great success over the past years of our existence:
1. Define Clear Goals and Objectives
You need to bring your employees into the fold and walk them through the goals you desire to achieve as a business owner and each employee’s objectives to ensure they know what they need to contribute to the bigger picture. In a way, you are giving them an inside look into your strategy and ambitions so they can identify whether your goals align with theirs. It is always a top priority to ensure your employees understand what they are doing and how it will impact their career goals.
Putting all the goals and objectives in a document that employees can easily access for reference is advisable. Also, ensure that all the employees are always aware of any change in goals and objectives.
Pro-Tip
Make sure the goals and objectives follow the SMART standard. That is, the goals should be:
- Specific – Focusing on a single item. Each item should limit its scope to a limited focus area. The goal should also ask why, when, how, and with whom.
- Measurable – The goal should be easy to measure in that, in the end, you need to have a system in place on how to measure your success.
- Attainable – Ensure it is easy for your employees to achieve set goals and objectives. It would be best to give them purposes within their scope of influence rather than outside their range.
- Relevant – You need to show them how achieving the goals applies to you, their roles, and their careers.
- Time-bound – You must give them ample time to achieve their goals.
2. Develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
SOPs are step-by-step guides that walk your employees through processes that enable them to complete tasks correctly and on time. Documenting these steps helps you to empower your employees by giving them the tools necessary for completing their assignments on time. In addition, they can always refer to the SOPs whenever they are stuck.
With these SOPs, employees no longer have to leave many messages on how to go about various situations in their inboxes. Instead, have a document that they can easily access at any time to figure out what to do.
Pro-Tip
At first, you will create the SOPs, but after some time, you must request your employees to add anything else you may have missed. Since they will be doing most of the work procedures, they will be in a much better place than you to identify what is important and therefore needs to be adequately documented for future reference.
3. Employ Project Management Tools
Project management tools such as Notion, Trello, and Asana are brilliant at keeping project-related tasks, ideas, conversations, and, most importantly, people in a commonplace. These tools enable you to track the progress of these projects from start to finish and always ensure the right person is doing the right thing. The main idea here is to ensure that projects are straightforward, leading to clarity.
Pro-Tips
- Make sure you choose a tool that accommodates your team, business needs, and, most importantly, budget.
- After that, choose one tool and stick to it to ensure project management procedures do not always change.
- Lastly, train your employees to use these tools and give them access so they can start using them.
4. Implement Communication Protocols
Communication is vital in remote work since it ensures everyone is on the same page at every step. Communication is always central to ensuring the team feels united in their work and efforts and, most importantly, the team bonds regularly. You should therefore have ideal communication protocols in place, like how often you should check in with individual employees, have group meetings, and when you need feedback sessions.
Pro-Tips
- Ensure that all communication channels are open and that all employees can access every communication channel whenever they need to communicate.
- Ensure you always communicate with all your employees and maintain contact regularly.
- Ensure your workers are always aware of the various communication protocols within your organization.
5. Provide Training And Support
Always ensure that all your employees receive proper and timely training on the systems you have in place for them. It will be essential to schedule regular meetings to train your team on how to access these systems and when to access them, to mention a few.
Remember, training your employees empowers them and sets them up for success.
Pro-Tips
- Ensure all your employees attend training sessions to ensure all team members have critical information.
- Ensure that after the training sessions, all your employees learn how to engage all available systems at work to meet set goals.
6. Encourage Feedback
It is always essential to ask your employees what they think of the systems you have in place to help them achieve the best standards. Do this regularly to ensure timely feedback, followed by timely and helpful assistance. In addition, remote workers may have unique ideas and suggestions that you can implement to ensure you are always aware of everything that is affecting your people.
Pro-Tip
Always be open to ideas from your employees. Be ready to shift your reasoning and perspective to understand your employees’ discussion.
7. Continuously Evaluate Systems
Always have a monitoring and evaluation system that will ensure you regularly check for failures and successes in your plans to ensure you always have the best methods. Doing this regularly, after every three months, to first give ample time for the application so that you can get meaningful feedback during evaluation.
Pro-Tip
You can do this by sending out surveys to your employees to fill in to make informed decisions, not assumptions.
8. Involve Your Remote Employees
It is always a top management skill to involve your employees as much as possible and as often as possible when creating systems that will affect their way of doing work. Ask for their advice and opinions regularly before forcing anything on them, which would be borderline arrogance. Doing this makes your employees feel listened to and appreciated.
Pro-Tip
In as much as you want to involve your employees, always have in mind that everything they suggest should be of benefit to the company and to everyone on the team. No biases.
It is, therefore, essential that we also understand why having these systems in place benefits you.
Benefits Of Creating Systems For Remote Workers
Here are some of the stand-out benefits of having correctly set up systems for remote workers at your workplace:
- Improved Productivity
When remote workers have clear guidelines, policies, and procedures, they will be in a much better place to work more efficiently. By having this vital information, they will always know what to do, even in your absence. A proper system, if well set up, can ensure everyone in your team knows what they need to do and always works towards that.
- Enhanced Collaboration
Having well-set-up systems for your remote teams ensures they are always in a much better position to work toward achieving team goals. In addition, systems provide your workers are constantly referencing the same rule book. This makes it easier for them to collaborate on projects and tasks easily.
- Reduced Confusion
Having well-set-up systems at your workplace significantly reduces the likelihood of employee confusion. This critical step ensures that the correct person completes work promptly and adequately. Confusion will lead to the inability to meet deadlines and, worst, not get things done the right way, which will be detrimental to your overall productivity.
- Simplified Work
If you have polished systems at your workplace, you stand a chance of making work easier for yourself and your employees. Through proper structures and even proper documentation of processes, your employees will be capable of tackling even the most challenging tasks with simplicity. In addition, making work easy for your employees ensures they can do more work each time with a high success rate.
On your side, too, it makes your work easy since you do not have to be present or available for work to be done. You have empowered your employees and given them all they need to produce quality results.
- Simplified Onboarding
Whenever you have a new employee joining the team, you always take some time to bring them up to speed and help them fit in as soon as possible. However, if you already have proper systems, you can reduce the onboarding time and enable your recruits to join the team seamlessly. In addition, if you decline the time you spend onboarding new employees, you should have extra time to use on core tasks.
Iterate And Evolve
As you create the systems for your teams, getting them right the first time will take much work. After that, it will take patience and persistence to start seeing meaningful results. Feel free to experiment with new ideas occasionally, learn from your mistakes, and turn them into learning and growth points. You can engage our services if you recruit the right talent to do your work impeccably.
Frequently Asked Questions
What 3 Things Are Critical For Remote Working Success?
Overall, we’ve determined the three fundamental tenets that remote work requires: transparency, trust, and time management. Of course, these three components are crucial for teams that don’t operate remotely, but they’re necessary if you want to succeed with remote work.
What Is The Hardest Part About Working Remotely?
Finding the correct routine and dealing with solitude are usually the most challenging aspects of working remotely. However, many remote workers claim that their isolation from peers impacts their mental health and productivity.
What Makes A Good Remote Work Culture?
Open lines of connection – Building a culture of trust at work depends on transparency, which must start at the top. Clear expectations have already been stressed, but managers should regularly schedule virtual meetings with remote workers.