How To Manage Your Online Business With Remote Employees

According to Global Workplace Analytics, remote opportunities are the best way to increase the productivity of the company. Research also suggests that working remotely is ideal for many employees. A US-based Gallup research conducted in 2019 reveals that 43% of employees work occasionally online.

While the employees find working remotely convenient, managers have a hard time maintaining a productive work environment. Gaining the trust of a remote team or even trusting them at times can be a hell of a task. However, the truth is that this working remotely is the future and therefore managers need to adapt themselves according to the situation and learn how to lead a remote team. Here is a few way managers can do so:

1. Be Clear On What You Want 

Discuss clearly about your expectations of taking the company to a certain level and specific direction. Don’t be shy when you are discussing their role and duties in achieving those expectations. One thing you can do is incorporate the company policies of your retail business into your morning meetings. Getting them reviewed and repeated once in a while will help in determining the responsibilities more officially without offending anyone. More so, review these policies yourself and get them reviewed by HR again and again so that you can remind the roles and duties of everyone while maintaining accuracy and recency.

2. Make Time For a Small Talk

This is something managers should be following religiously. It is possible that your employees will be working in a different time zone. This is your responsibility to get them on one call and give them an update about where the company is. Keep it in mind that this call has to be made daily as it will encourage the exchange of any new ideas. This is a great time to motivate your employees.

3. One On Ones Are Important 

It is more like “my door is always open for my employees”  as it encourages smooth communication. Working remotely comes with its limits and one of the major one is the communication gap. In order to improve communication with employees, you can always maintain a calendar so that you can talk to each employee for at least 5 minutes. Another thing you can do is to give them the schedule of your free hours so that they can arrange a meeting with you.

4. Candid Discussions

Though it might not sound very professional, it can do wonders for your communication. In a typical office environment, while making an announcement, your expressions help you a lot in making the statement. However, if you keep sending messages with bland text on a daily basis, there is a high probability that your employees will either get bored with your messages or might not even understand the message. Emoticons are a great help in such a situation since they can express what you are not able to. If you want to keep your conversation light and breezy, you can even use gifs. 

Your Employees Also Have Expectations

When your employee joined your company, he/she also wanted to have a career path despite working remotely. In the first meeting, ask them about where they want to go based on their interests. This might help you utilize their additional skills, for example, a social media manager can help you curate content. However, do ask them if they really want to take the role or not and if they can manage in the time.

Maintaining an online business is one job and doing it with remote employees is another. Combining two of them together can be an ultimate hustle. However, using a few of the above suggestions, you can minimize many risks that you might face while trying to manage remote staff. 

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