In modern times, remote work becomes more and more popular and common both for employers and employees. Today, I am going to show you how to extend your team with remote employees.
If you consider between in-house or remote employees to hire, take a look at our previous post where we compared benefits and pitfalls of hiring remote contractors. Still, the advantages prevailer and nowadays more and more companies resource to remote workforce looking for remote specialists on relevant websites.
Before inviting a remote specialist to your team, check out this useful article on how to hire remote employees and manage teams to end up with the best remote team collaboration, achievements, and results.
Of course, there are positive and negative sides of hiring remote team members, but it is the proper remote management software that can make all processes easier.
Rapidly Increasing Popularity of Remote Work Opportunities
The popularity of remote work is no joke and a lot of workers nowadays, especially Millennials, consider quitting their current job positions to find remote ones or wait for the company they work in to provide them with workplace flexibility. For example, Ryan Jenkins noted that the most important factors of choosing a job offer (or staying on the current position) for Millennials include work-life balance (84%) and work flexibility (82%) firstly, while salary and even benefits play less valuable roles.
There is no need to have the whole team sitting in one room to provide the most effective results, and a distributed team can deliver even more effective work results and productivity. No wonder that hiring remote employees is a common practice of successful companies around the world, from small startups to international to large global companies. The key to success is the project management tools that are in use in these companies.
If your company isn’t remote but you plan to transition your business to remote work, you can also partner with an Employer of Record services to compliantly hire and manage employees worldwide. For example, if a U.S.-based startup wants to quickly hire software developers overseas without setting up a local entity, an EOR can take care of payroll, benefits, and compliance on their behalf. This makes international expansion and distributed hiring much smoother and legally secure.
If your company isn’t remote but you plan to transition your business to remote work, here are a few tips I invite you to check out.
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What Software Can Help to Manage Remote Employees and Teams?
Inaccessibility of adequate tools is one of the greatest challenges virtual teams are facing. At Growth Hackers, we manage international teams across time zones using a carefully selected tech stack, proving that the right tools turn remote collaboration into a competitive advantage.
The thing is, it is crucial for all team members to be able to communicate with each other working on the same task or the whole project, no matter if they sit in the next room or work remotely.
Fortunately, there are many useful technological advances in remote team communication and effective collaboration if you want to ramp up remote work that can help you to build and manage the most efficient team. The following is a list of beneficial remote team management software to help you.
As team communication tools, these programs proved to be the easiest to use and the most efficient ones:
● Slack (the most popular messaging app for big teams, with communication channels and file sharing options)
● Flock (a nice alternative to Slack, lower price and a number of useful features for remote teams)
For video chats and meetings that are essential for teams where some members or all of them work remotely, these applications are successfully used by thousands of remote teams:
● Zoom (the best video app with a stable Internet connection, allows to have a video call for 50 people for free and have few video conversation simultaneously in different chats)
● Google Hangouts (video chat up to 25 team members right in your browser, has the best integration with other Google services)
● ProProfs Project (project management tool to collaborate with multiple teams easily)
● Cisco WebEx (video app with a possibility to type, draw, and show anything on the screen for better understanding and team productivity, usually used by remote designers)
Also, take a look at this project management software that can definitely improve your remote team cooperation and results:
● Trello (a highly visual and intuitive app for team collaboration, tasks displayed as cards and can be sorted by priority, group, members, etc.)
● Asana (provide templates to build a workflow quickly, create projects, lists, tasks, and even divide them into sub-tasks if needed)
● Smartsheet (for teams that prefer visual communication and spreadsheet information, the best tool for designers and diverse teams)
● ProofHub (a multi-tasking tool that includes group chats, tasks, calendar, reports, and much more for team efficiency) Moreover, it is vital to use specific tools for bug and issue tracking, so check out these useful ones:
● JIRA (the most useful for bug tracking and issue discussion, usually used by software developers)
● Bugzilla (another useful web-based interface for bug and issue tracking)
● Backlog (an online tool for bug tracking and general project management, has a full history of issue updates and comments available for every team member)
To help designers and website developers collaborate greatly, you can take a look at this programs:
● Visual Inspector (cloud-based application to inspect and edit websites instantaneously)
● InVision (for feedback visualization)
● Usersnap (for capturing screens and saving comments, can be integrated with Slack and Trello)
For cloud storage, these apps are the most useful ones:
● Google Drive (the biggest cloud storage platform with a lot of functionality)
● Confluence (another helpful tool for online data storage, usually used for sharing manuals and instructions).
● Dropbox (the best tool when it comes to syncing and sharing files)
If you want to get more information regarding any helpful tool mentioned above, rest assured, there are many other project management tools out there. This team gathered a lot of useful information concerning successful remote work management.
Best Tips for Finding Great Remote Employees for Your Team
If you decided to go ahead with outstaffing, it is critical to find the best person that will contribute to your team performance both with professional and personal traits. Here you can see recommendations on how to hire the most suitable remote specialist for your team:
1. Choose remote employees carefully.
Prepare a list of requirements to the specialist you are going to hire: initially indicate what qualifications, knowledge, and experience you are seeking for, what is needed additionally, share some brief explanation regarding future duties. This way, you will be able to review only those applicants that fit your needs the most. For background verification of these employees, you can try pre-employment background check tools to hire the correct and reliable employees for the organization.
2. Offer an accountability and company culture in return.
To build successful long-time working relationships, you need to provide your future employee with appropriate working conditions and interest him with the benefits of your company. High-qualified specialists usually have a number of offers to choose from, and you need to show why taking your job offer will benefit both of you. Also, it is important to set clear expectations for remote employees and discuss all duties beforehand, so that no miscommunication will appear from the start.
3. A good communication rhythm is a must.
The communication within a team and between in-house and remote workers is the essential thing. It will help your remote workers deal with their stress level. Nothing will work if there are communication problems, though you can avoid most communication pitfalls establishing communication tools, and scheduling meetings and discussions of current stages of the projects you work on together.
4. Right tools for the right team.
Using the right tools is one of those hacks you should leverage to level up your team. Following the previous point, it is vital to provide both in-house and remote workers with easy-to-use tools not only for communication but also for planning, commenting, editing, tracking, sharing, etc. This way, all team members will be able to work on the projects effectively and catch up any changes immediately.
5. Result-oriented approach.
For remote workers, it is hard to calculate their productivity concerning working hours. But concentrating on results and completed tasks will help you to understand and measure the contribution of the remote employees and draw conclusions.
When Growth Hackers shifted from tracking hours to tracking outcomes, productivity increased, accountability strengthened, and our remote teams began delivering faster and better results.
6. Remote employee recognition within the team.
It is important not to diminish remote employees’ work within the team because every remote team member is still the team member and works on projects as much as in-house team members do. This will definitely boost your remote employees’ mental health. Thus, stressing out their belonging to the team will help you to keep remote employees’ engagement and motivation.
If you are looking for more advice on how to manage a remote team, do not hesitate to reach out to us as we’re a full team of remote employees.
It’s time to reach new heights and get a remote growth team for your business!
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Essential Characteristics of Remote Employees to Work with In-House Team
Remote work contains mutual benefits both for employers and employees, but it is crucial to keep in mind that not every person, even the best specialists, can work remotely and provide the results timely and effectively. Here is a list of skills and characteristics essential for remote employees for successful long-term cooperation:
● Communication skills (good communication skills is the keystone to success in understanding each other within a team, especially when there are members who work remotely)
● Technical skills (this part depends on your requirement as well as the general technical knowledge required for remote work employees)
● Self-management and organizational skills (the critical part is the self-organizational skills of the remote worker who will set up his schedule, prioritize and manage his tasks and time to efficiently collaborate with other members)
● Self-motivation (the self-motivation of remote employees should be higher than those who work in-house to provide real results timely; also, proactivity is welcome as fresh ideas from new workers or new perspectives can contribute the current situation significantly)
● Flexibility and adaptability (though there are fixed working hours for in-house workers only, the remote employee should be ready to manage his time to collaborate with in-house part of the team in proper time)
● An adequate response to feedback and constructive criticism (the person should quickly and appropriately respond to feedbacks provided, so the necessary changes will be done quickly, without hard feelings and arguing)
● Remote working experience (not crucial but preferable, so you can be sure that the person understands what the remote work really is)
● Trustworthiness (follows the experience, it is easier to know whether you can trust your remote worker or not if he worked remotely previously and you can get recommendations and feedback regarding his skills and personality from his previous workplace)
It’s safer to choose someone who fits the majority of these requirements. You can mention all the requirements in your job offer to make sure that the specialists who apply to your position are ready to prove that they have the skills and characteristics mentioned above and, thus, can make a great contribution to your team and project.
When at Growth Hackers, we expanded our remote team, we quickly learned that technical talent alone was not enough, and the professionals who thrived were those who communicated clearly, embraced feedback, and took full ownership of their work.
Is It Worthy Hiring Remote Employees?
Offering flexibility and remote work opportunities will help your company attract top entrepreneurial talents. When working with remote employees, you still want to make sure that they adhere to your company culture and vision. You also want them to have a right work-life balance.
Why? Because you don’t want them to make a burnout and have a high employee turnover. Here are 15 ways to increase employee loyalty that I recommend you apply to your business.
Extending your team with remote employees can help you to lower business costs while widening the talent pool and diverse workforce that is amazing. Also, the flexibility of remote workers can play into your hands and the company’s results if managed correctly.
Of course, there are some pitfalls of remote hiring such as the possibility of communication problems and weak engagement, high turnover rates and technical difficulties, but being informed and prepared to these situations, you can reap the benefits only of hiring remote workers.
Growth Hackers is one of the top growth marketing companies for startups as well as big brands. We help businesses with traffic and lead generation, conversion rate optimization and most importantly we help businesses achieve revenue growth. If you’re looking to grow your brand, contact GrowthHackers today and we’ll be able to help you tomorrow.
