5 Basic Needs of Virtual Workforces

According to data from Global Workplace Analytics, the number of remote employees in the United States has gone up by 79.7 percent since 2005. In the U.S., around 3.3 million people work from home.and this is just report of USA , we have list of others like INDIA  PAKISTAN AND BANGLADESH AND PHILIP ENS

But these are not just freelancers. More organizations are adopting a fully remote work culture. Base camp, Mozilla and Automatic are three well-known companies that fall under the 100-percent-distributed category. Automatic, owner of WordPress, has been able to scale up operations to nearly 300 people and more than 131M monthly website visitors — the 3rd highest on the Internet — with a purely distributed team.

Among other benefits, remote work saves considerable time for the entire organization, and allows employees far more flexibility. To shift to a remote model successfully, however, management practices have to adapt to remote work, even if only a few workers are remote. New technologies – and the proper use of old technologies – are a crucial part of this adaptation.

In our experience at VenturePact, telecommuters tend to be self-starters and quick learners. You don’t have to micromanage them, just provide clear, high-level direction. But there are some common pain points. In a 2014 Robert Half Technology survey of U.S.-based CIOs, 30% said communication was their greatest remote management challenge, followed by productivity (22%) and technology (22%). Focusing on a few principles can help address these challenges:

INSIGHT CENTER

• The Future of Collaboration

  SPONSORED BY ACCENTURE

  How tools are changing the way we manage, learn, and get things done.

Convenience: This should go without saying, but it is important to give your virtual employees large monitors, great computers, and fast Internet. This will encourage them to work hard and stick with you for the long term. Bad tools hurt productivity. Scott Hanselman, who has been working with Microsoft remotely for the past 7 years, explains the challenges of being a remote worker: “Every week you’ll hit a site that doesn’t work unless you’re inside. You’ll be constantly prompted for passwords, you’ll be told certain scripts or installers don’t work as a remote worker. I have to drive into the office at least quarterly JUST for the purpose of dealing with issues like this.”  When you force your employees to use slow or inconvenient technology, the costs don’t show up on your balance sheet immediately. But they’re there all the same.

Transparency: To help make your team members’ private knowledge public to the group, invest in knowledge management tools that are accessible and searchable by everyone in the company. Any question a new employee has can be submitted to the system and should be visible to anyone in the company. This is a lot better than email, where the employee emails one person and the question is only answered once. If you use a knowledge management tool, the tag on the question will allow the next employee, who will probably have similar questions, to easily find and learn by searching through past questions. Tools like Slack and Sqwiggle can help with this.

Transparency tools are necessary even if only part of your team is remote. As David Fullerton, VP of Engineering at StackExchange, writes, “There’s no halfsies in a distributed team. If even one person on the team is remote, every single person has to start communicating online. The locus of control and decision making must be outside of the office: no more dropping in to someone’s office to chat, no more rounding people up to make a decision. All of that has to be done online even if the remote person isn’t around. Otherwise you’ll slowly choke off the remote person from any real input on decisions.”

Accountability: How do you keep track of what your colleagues are doing when you can’t see them? Define goals clearly and then have the remote team decide on the path to reach that goal. Rather than dictating each specific task, provide them a vision to work on. Let them hold each other accountable, and ask them to assign themselves daily goals and provide weekly reports. This level of responsibility helps remote workers learn on the job and stay motivated. To track progress, use project management tools like Asana, Basecamp or JIRA.

Importantly, don’t mention that a task needs to get done to a team of four people without holding one person accountable for ensuring that a task is complete by a specific deadline. Remember, to properly execute on task management, you need:

1. A task management tool
2. One person held accountable to complete a project
3. A deadline
4. Clear guidelines as to what the project entails.

Communication: Take time every week to have a candid conversation with remote employees. Make sure you include personal questions to get a sense of the employees’ interests and, if they’re in a different country, their culture.

Consider using an instant messaging tool for your team such as HipChat, IRC, Google Hangouts, or Skype. This way, people can easily reach out to everyone else in the firm regardless of location. Ideally, try to have all remote employees organize their hours such that each person has a 2-hour overlap in working hours with at least one other teammate. When you have remote teams that cross many time zones, this can become difficult, but it is critical.

Try to also have multiple calls a week (sometimes daily) to go over any challenges the team is facing. We like to use video calls, as it helps build a relationship and the visual cues allow for clearer communication. Whichever means you choose to communicate with your virtual employees, make sure you communicate regularly, openly and clearly.

Trust: Remote workers often miss the feeling of company culture, so management must make an extra effort to cultivate trust and involve remote team members.

There are many ways to do this. You can create inspiring videos that speak about company culture, like this one created by Zappos. You can involve remote employees in company events — small or big — and share the company’s future vision with them. At VenturePact, we communicate interesting startup stories at companywide events, which helps employees understand the values and vision of our startup, and at the same time feel part of the team. A common misconception is that remote or distributed teams never meet, but I recommend that teams meet once every quarter and the whole company, once a year. Since most people will travel, it is best to choose an amazing location with great weather to create a unique experience. These in-person interactions help build trust.

Another technique to build trust is professional and personal check-ins, a strategy Keith Ferrazzi mentions in his article on remote work: “A personal/professional check-in at the beginning of meetings makes people feel part of a team. It’s probably the easiest way to overcome the isolation that can creep in when people don’t work together physically,” he says.

Finally, one best practice we find effective is to encourage personal sharing with the whole team through Yammer, an enterprise social network that creates a Facebook-like environment where everyone on the team can share pictures from the weekend, their travel plans and any interesting articles they are reading.

Above all, the key to a successful remote engagement is a great hiring and management process. As Jason Fried puts it in Remote: Office Not Required: “If you let them, humans have an amazing power to live up to your high expectations of reasonableness and responsibility.”