Why Managers Should Educate Their Remote Teams About Local Market

Remote teams have been on the rise for a while. As businesses worldwide expand beyond their borders and telecommuting gets more popular, teams have started spanning widespread distances. Equipped with multimedia devices and basic connectivity to the internet, people can work from anywhere. And this calls for understanding why managers should educate their remote teams about the local market.

Remote Working Trends

The appeal of forming remote teams has been there for quite some time now. However, their popularity has skyrocketed ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19. According to a recent study, 75% of people consider remote working as the norm in the wake of the coronavirus. Furthermore, a recent SHRM study found out that 64% of U.S. employees are working remotely. Thus, it has helped squash the misconception that collaboration is tricky to stimulate when the workforce is distributed. In addition, it has also changed the perspective of organizations on remote work.

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Remote work has evolved from being viewed as an optional risk or a temporary solution to temporary problems. It has, however, come at a price. Employees are wondering if this radical switch will exist as an impromptu or force a permanent paradigm shift. On the other hand, employers are grappling with managing distributed teams while upholding a strong team culture.

It’s safe to say that the transition has not been easy for business leaders. According to a survey by Terminal titled Remote Leadership Report, 77% of leaders have never managed a fully distributed team, while 89% have never driven a partially remote team. Without a system to facilitate remote work, leading distributed teams can quickly become a nightmare. In light of this alteration of the recruitment & work order, managers and business leaders would do well to look for specific soft skills that allow their remote resources to understand the goals and objectives of the company while recruiting.

Why Should Remote Managers Be Particular About Goal Alignment?

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Aligning brand goals with remote workers is key to a successful working experience. Only a team that is familiar with a brand’s goals and its market will succeed remotely. The next step is to make their skills integral to the team’s culture and contribute to its larger goals.

There’s a strong causality between company culture and employee performance. Moreover, numerous studies backed with exhaustive research have shown how initiating individual employees with the company’s organizational goals can foster enhanced collaboration.

When your workforce is aligned with the organization’s goals, they sympathize better with them. They know what steps need to be taken to contribute to the overall success of the company.  Among other things, your organization will be well-positioned to reap the following benefits:

• Improved overall business performance
• Quicker execution of company strategy
• Evolution of better leaders
• Retainment of more remote employees
• Development of a uniform brand voice

Importance of a Culture-Driven Mission

People are the lifeblood of any business, and businesses can’t successfully function without them. But, unfortunately, many a time, the very things that are supposed to propel businesses forward, driving productivity, enabling collaboration between departments, and adjusting to a perpetually changing competitive landscape, often focus on processes rather than the people they are meant for.

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Due to today’s talent shortages and distributed workforce, organizations should deploy the right resources instantly to maintain a desirable time to market. Moreover, employers need to pay close attention to the culture they set to work efficiently and productively.

Researchers have extensively reviewed how optimization of efficiency and the productivity of distributed systems teams depend upon organizational culture. For example, according to a 2019 article by the American Psychological Association, working remotely can “improve employee productivity, creativity, and morality” on the premise that employees adequately understand the nature of the work. Moreover, employers shall adopt appropriate strategies to align their workforce with its brand goals to foster collaboration.

How to Align Remote Workers With Brand Goals?

We have already established how important it is to align remote workers with brand goals and how essential it is to be an employee engagement strategy. Furthermore, studies have shown that initiating remote workforces with company goals have many other implications, such as:

• Employees who are well initiated and committed work a lot harder and are much more dedicated to the business
• Businesses with better employee commitment metrics earn two and a half times more profit than their rivals
• Dissatisfied employees cost US$450-550 million annually due to low-performance values and reduced turnover

When you want your remote teams to perform well, you must consider the tools they will need. Aside from providing the right tools, businesses should also do a lot of digital legwork and set up the right processes, including:

Increase Internal Communications

For the most part, Miscommunication is the obstacle that hinders remote teams the most from achieving their objectives. Collaborative software systems can help employees interact more through the proper channels, thus reducing misinformation and removing the first barrier to hindered productivity.

Capture Important Data About Employee Tasks

The first and only quantitative metric you need to make you understand and handle your virtual teams is the data you get about their performance from your work management app. With the help of this information, you will be able to notice important behavioral patterns. For example, login times can help you ascertain the duration of attendance, while task completion logs can help you identify when employees work effectively. It can thus help you define the best times for meetings and calls.

Deliver Important Messages About Brand Goals

Digital communication tools provide you with ways to inform your workers how their roles and duties contribute to the business’s overall objectives. You can equip your employees with immediate insights and a collection of their performance metrics to demonstrate to them how their activities and production benefit the business in terms of productivity.

Allocate the Right Tasks and Goals to Teams

Technology can provide you with ways to accomplish your organizational objectives through a series of goals and targets that your employees can see. Having the ability to relate their work to the purposes of the business is among the first things that a committed employee must-have.

Set SMART Objectives

Your objectives and desired results should be SMART objectives, i.e., they should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Ensure that you assign the appropriate tasks to the right people, determine who is accountable for what, that workers get enough time to complete their jobs, and that the targets are easy to quantify.

Train Workers on How to Use Digital Tools

Please don’t assume that your workers will utilize your chose collaboration & communication tools unless you train them correctly in it. Most of the time, employees only use such tools to perform the most basic tasks, but you can promote its proactive usage more efficiently if you incentivize some parts of the software.

Automate Your PMS (Performance Management System)

When you automate this aspect of the collaboration & communication solution, you can establish better targets, enable your workers to complete tasks more quickly, and equip yourself with the right insights about your team’s performance. In addition, when you circulate the tasks into an organized framework that generates real-time management reports, you can utilize it to inspire your employees and celebrate their participation.

Communicate Regularly

You must be in frequent touch with your staff. This helps you prevent blunders and allows you to develop stronger relationships and match goals through consistent interaction. Evaluate the progress rate and goals positively, but also be frank when it comes to shortcomings. Always concentrate your conversations on the priorities of the business and how to achieve them.

Operate Above Task Level

Although educating your workforce on using your online platform and the chosen digital solution is necessary, don’t make their jobs heavily dependent and reliant on technological enforcement. Instead, concentrate on the most critical aspects of the work while motivating to engage in reward schemes.

Collaboration depends on your communication skills’ efficiency and the remote working tools you employ for your team. While aligning your remote team with business goals can seem daunting at times, SMART goals, regular communication, and regularly conveying business goals can help increase engagement.

The Uplers Advantage

Uplers is a global digital services provider offering end-to-end web, design, digital marketing, and other services to businesses across 52+ nations. Our expertise as one of the world’s leading talent providers helps organizations build effective remote teams.