Essential HR Tips for Managing Remote Workers

Though remote working promises a lot of conveniences for modern businesses, it also presents a slew of HR challenges that need to be addressed. Here's some essential tips for managing your remote workers.

Establish Clear Communication Methods

Managing remote workers should always start with formally set-out methods and standards of communication. HR professionals should discuss the needs and expectations of individual managers, the daily updates / reporting tasks they need from their remote teams, and finally agree on the communication channels that will be used and times of day when a given employee must be available.

As an international organisation, it's key that you have a global view of employees, data and KPIs. This will help to compare HR between different geographical markets and identify and rectify issues quickly.

Keep Remote Employees in the Loop

Communication, as they say, is a two-way street. If your business is only just beginning to embrace remote working, you may have many workers who are used to getting important information through verbal, in-person interactions while in the office.

To make sure these workers aren't kept in the dark when you need it least, HR must come up with the same clear instructions to the seniority at an organisation about how they should be distributing information to their remote teams. Although this will come naturally as more people at the business get used to the remote working model, it pays to nudge those involved in the early stages.

Maintain a Focus on Output

Although it's important to have clearly defined communication channels and regular updates, you don't want your remote workers to suffer under overzealous management of the way they carry out their work. Certain routine conversations which might be completely normal in an office setting can amount to micromanaging when an employee is working from home. When a given professional always has the sense that they're being scrutinised, it can impact their efficiency, and grind down the benefit of flexibility that remote workers are meant to promise.

Once managers have delivered their clearly defined and measurable goals, it's best to treat remote workers with a certain degree of trust, managing their own time and the methods they use to complete their work. For this reason, HR should emphasise that managers should try to focus more on their remote team's output through efficient staff planning, rather than the processes which were previously happening right in front of them.