remote-work-challenges

A Quick Guide For AU Entrepreneurs to Dealing With Remote Work Challenges

Remote working is fast becoming the next big thing in human resourcing and organisation staffing in Australia and other parts of the world. This dynamic shift may be largely attributed to the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic but it offers multiple advantages. 

Remote working has allowed millions of qualified people living in low-income regions such as India and Asia to earn money commensurate to their qualifications and service without having to relocate abroad. Also, entrepreneurs access to the best of brains for the delivery of top-notch services.

While the rewards of remote working are high, sourcing and managing remote workers can be very tasking and may even turn out risky sometimes. In this article, every Australian entrepreneur can discover what the many different remote working challenges are and the simple ways to manage them using the right tools.

Hiring Remote Workers

Hiring remote workers is one of the challenges many entrepreneurs face, they are usually at a loss as to what procedure to employ for their hiring process. Although the process of hiring remote workers can be time-consuming, however, if done properly, it can guarantee your team’s success.

Offshore staffing solutions can be done either by making use of BPO companies or remote work agencies or by directly hiring freelancers.

Remote work agencies have grown increasingly sought after due to the pandemic. They provide the right personnel for companies who face the problem of staffing. These agencies are renowned for finding the right talents for any industry and the amount of training they give to their employees on how to deal with the unique challenges of working from home so they can perform better as remote workers. The method of using offshore staffing solutions have proven effective in employing remote workers.

Communication

Effective communication with remote teams is another challenge entrepreneurs deal with. An entrepreneur will constantly need to receive feedback and share ideas with remote workers. The use of just email messaging to communicate may be stiff and restrict expression.

Team collaboration software like Zoom, Workplace and Google Hangout are rather excellent tools that support messaging, video sessions and file sharing.

Monitoring Productivity

It may be quite challenging to determine how much remote workers are contributing to the progress of an organisation. 

A simple way to track progress is to make use of metric tools and provide remote workers with daily goals to achieve such as a specified number of contents to edit or a given number of calls to make. For effectiveness, the use of metrics for remote workers should be commensurate to their abilities and the facilities they have access to.

Scheduling Meetings

Offshore staffing solutions bring up the challenges of differences in time zones. An entrepreneur should factor in this when allocating tasks and ensure tasks are set to be accomplished at least a day before they are needed. This will always allow remote workers with lagging time zones to be able to contribute their required quota to every task.

While scheduling virtual meetings and calls with remote workers, entrepreneurs should make use of tools like calendar apps to determine the exact time in each worker’s time zone. This way, a time frame fair enough to everyone can be selected.

Building the Trust Of Remote Workers

A major challenge with offshore staffing solutions is building trust on both ends. The employer is concerned with how much remote workers will perform while the remote worker is bothered about getting commensurate pay after performing tasks. Employers should build the trust of remote workers by being transparent on things such as pay rate, payment timelines, project expectations, working hours, and status updates on projects.

One-On-One Meetings And Morale

A great way to boost morale is through one-on-one meetings. While it might be too much to schedule this kind of meetings with every member of your remote team, doing it can increase how well workers see their value and allow getting feedback on work performance. It’s easy for remote workers to feel out of touch if one-on-one meetings are not scheduled regularly or every once in a while.

Related article: How To Maintain a Great Workplace Culture In a Remote Model

Conclusion

Offshore staffing solutions are excellent support to working systems in Australia. The processes in hiring and managing remote workers may pose great challenges to inexperienced entrepreneurs. Hence, this article has been provided as the Australian entrepreneur’s guide to dealing with remote work challenges.