Forest Software

Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business

Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:30 pm

As a small or medium business you may find that letting people work remotely (at home or at clients sites) can improve their productivity and morale – as our work/life balance for small businesses article mentions,  Introducing a flexible working policy can in many cases benefit everyone, staff / business owners and clients.

The problem that many businesses have though is how to manage or control these workers – after all we have all heard about people working at home and spending hours playing Facebook games, downloading videos or even staying in bed or going out when they should be working.

So, listed below are 7 simple steps to manage remote workers :-

  1. Know your workers – make sure that you spend time with remote workers, either by scheduled meetings at the office, at their home or at a meeting place midway between the two.  This can be something as simple as meeting for a coffee and an informal catch-up or something much more formal such as a review of the work done.  By meeting your workers you can find out if there are any worries or problems which might otherwise have been missed by you.  Don’t isolate remote workers by encouraging regular visits to the work place, include remote workers in social events arranged by the company, and if possible have more of these – they need not cost the business anything can could be something like a bowling evening, a trip to the theatre, a night at the greyhounds or anything else that the staff might enjoy.
  2. Trust your workers – if you don’t trust your workers then it doesn’t really matter whether they are working in your office or at home, you will be worrying about what they are doing.  Many people react to being trusted by acting well and even working harder than they do in an office.  The author has found that in the past when he worked from home he got his head down and worked rather than getting involved with the office chit-chat.
  3. Get regular updates – ask your remote workers to drop you an email at the end of each week with what they have been doing and any problems that they have.  This can be as simple as a bullet list just containing a list of work done or more complicated and might include the time spent of each task (essential if you are billing the work out to your customers).  Personally I would not ask for updates  more often than this as from experience it can take a chunk of working time each day to send a daily status update, although if you would expect daily reports from the member of staff if they were working in your office then stick to that schedule.
  4. Respect peoples personal time – if you have remote workers that maybe work from 9am to 3pm don’t email them at 4:30 and expect an answer.  Just because you can contact them out their working hours doesn’t mean that you should.
  5. Be output driven – often managers in offices use input (time in the office) as a measure of control, switching to output (goals met) means that you are concentrating on the thing that matters and not having to worry about times so much.
  6. Get the right technology. It goes without saying that you need technology to make remote teams and individuals work effectively. It can be very frustrating when people try to video conference and their PC isn’t fast enough to cope with HD graphics and desktop sharing at the same time or if staff are having to rely onmobile broadband connections that never seem to be fast enough.  Think about using VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) where you and your staff can use your computers to telephone each other – one you may have heard of is Skype but there are other systems available.
  7. Training. Train managers and staff about the challenges and techniques of remote working. Don’t assume that everyone knows how to do it well – not everyone does and they may need extra help with, say, writing reports, using IT systems and even simple things like making sure that their email clients are set up correctly.  If you can, arrange for your IT support team (or whoever does your IT support) to spend a couple of hours with someone that is about to start working remotely making sure that all the equipment and software is set up correctly.

By the using remote workers effectively many businesses have improved their productivity and staff morale while at the same time reducing costs – this really is a win-win situation for all concerned.

And finally…

A couple of extra tips, the first is related to remote workers (although if you have several offices you could adopt this for those offices) while the second is a mark of good management no matter where your staff are working.

  1. Take pictures of your remote staff so that if you are phoning them, or in a conference call to a team of remote staff you can put their pictures on a board and visualise who you are talking to.
  2. It costs nothing to send an email to someone thanking them for putting in extra effort or producing a good piece of work.  As many teachers will tell you, praise is a very strong motivator – saying thank you to a member of staff makes them feel valued and encourages them to do as well next time.
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