Remote Hiring is not just a temporary trend, it has risen in popularity over the last few years; they are the future of both huge multinational companies and small businesses.
The evolution of this new paradigm is already a reality in the US, where more than 10% of employees work from home regularly (National Bureau of Economic Research). Latin America is still in the transition stage and acceptance of the remote work model, but freelance work is gaining more ground every day.
The new model promises greater access to talent, increased productivity for individuals and small teams, lower costs, more individual flexibility, and improved employee experiences.
While these potential benefits are substantial, there are also some factors to consider when hiring remote employees that can become big challenges day by day.
Here are some of the challenges that you may face:
- Lack of communication / insufficient information:
When working remotely, reaching out to a colleague isn’t simply a verbal ‘hello’ across your desk, daily communication and engagement requires a few more steps.
Before you hire a remote worker, make sure they have good written and oral communication skills. That can transmit complex ideas in an organized way and, at the same time, absorb and synthesize large amounts of information.
Provide an environment of open communication by using instant messaging tools like Slack or Whatsapp instead of email threads. You can also have daily or weekly video calls with your team to get them comfortable speaking with one another, encourage constant communication, and motivates them to speak up and share their ideas.
- Inadequate processes:
This may be the most important one, a good or bad process will define the success of your remote team member’s productivity and communication.
Not all processes work the same for all work teams to achieve goals. Perhaps it works for your face-to-face workers to carry out their activities in a certain way, but do not rule out that a remote team can develop its own, and more effective, methodology to reach the goals.
There are a lot of components that fall under the processes category, but they can generally be divided into the following:
- Filtering a large number of applications: Naturally, selecting suitable candidates for remote positions becomes tedious. And so, hiring managers must be clear about their expectations to ease the selection process.
Well-written and detailed job requirements can help eliminate the profiles that do not qualify for a given remote position. You can also optimize the remote hiring process by automating it or hiring someone else to handle this and the following steps that come with it.
- Vetting and skillset evaluation: You will always want to select candidates that possess adequate job-specific skills, no matter the position. But accurate skill assessments and evaluations are challenging to conduct in remote settings.
A great solution for this could be to design dedicated test projects for employing remote candidates and preparing skillset evaluations. Similarly, conducting customized skill assessments can also help in vetting candidates effectively.
- Onboarding difficulties: This part of the process can be tricky. Most new joiners are likely to feel overwhelmed during the first few days at the job. As a result, hiring managers may observe lower productivity with the new employees struggling to understand the workflow. You must make extra efforts to establish a smooth onboarding process to enhance employees’ learning curve.
Introductory sessions can help new joiners understand the workflow and processes, also building a healthy and transparent company culture. Better yet, having someone to conduct these sessions can help YOU improve overall business productivity.
- Lack of productivity and poor time management:
Just the fact that everyone is working from their homes, can mean distraction, right? There are parents, kids, pets, and general personal life backgrounds that can sometimes lead your Remote Team Member to become less productive.
Some other factors may affect your team’s productivity, like; including communication patterns, work culture, and employee morale.
So it is essential to ensure everyone is doing their job and team goals are being met, we must also detect when one of our remote collaborators is taking on more work than they can safely handle.
- Here are some additional ideas:
- Set daily and weekly goals; giving them a to-do list with small milestones will help them with efficiency and motivation.
- Promote benefits based on collective work results
- Ask them for feedback on how you can help them improve their work.
- Use collaborative cloud tools: such as Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox
- Be mindful and ask them how they feel personally and professionally and if there’s any way to make their work-life balance better.
Do you still have some doubts about how to overcome these challenges?
At BetterWho we can help you make sure your Remote Team Member is well trained and we can also help you overcome these challenges with our Comprehensive Hiring, Onboarding, and Training Service:
- We help you identify the team member profile that you are searching for, screen applicants, select the best and conduct interviews for you.
- We will narrow the field to the most qualified applicants and schedule an interview with you after providing personalized training on good interview questions.
- Then, we will help you build the systems that will make your business thrive with Remote Team Members, from training to evaluations and procedures.
Learn more about our helpful services to overcome some of the challenges you may encounter when hiring a remote team. You can visit our website www.betterwho.com or contact us.
