The 15 Most Common Questions & Answers About Managing Newly Remote Teams

Firstly, managers must gauge performance by output vs. time spent — a tactic that helps female remote workers get more done without being punished for their efficiency. While remote working has brought a new wave of opportunities for businesses to cut costs and for employees to manage their careers flexibly, it has undoubtedly created new challenges for women. Emphasize asynchronous communications so that employees rarely have to be present in real-time. This way, you can optimize for deep work and build a stronger documentation culture. Incorporate a local entity or use an EOR solution to ensure you can legally hire employees in other countries.

managing a remote team interview questions

Beyond spending a chunk of money on building out the best office, a low-budget approach to an ergonomic lifestyle can incorporate practices more than products to get the same or even better results. A few minutes spent stretching after an hour of work can be more beneficial to your physical wellness than yet another piece of equipment with an ergonomic tag on it. Investing in a quality home office will help your productivity, boost your confidence, and contribute to your long-term wellness in a remote environment. As the world navigates post-pandemic changes, it’s important to prepare your team’s remote strategy to adjust as the shift approaches. In this blog, our CEO Job outlines his tested and trusted tactics for managing Remote remotely — without ever meeting most of the team in person.

Global Workforce Revolution Report

The key to successfully mastering work-life balance is to set healthy boundaries that empower you to make a clean break from work to live mindfully. Since remote work is undoubtedly the present and future of both productivity and healthy living, taking the initiative to balance work and life will improve your productivity long term. To curb overwork in a remote culture, leaders must take the initiative to take time off work publicly and encourage employees to follow suit. Even when it seems a project might need just a few other finishing touches, because, let’s face it — you can’t finish projects to perfection every day.

  • Before remote work, HR would give new employees a tour of the building, perhaps including secret tips on the quietest break room.
  • Global businesses are typically not liable for corporate taxes wherever their employees are based, unless you cross a threshold known as permanent establishment.
  • But within a remote team, meetings sure do have their place as long as they’re an extension of an asynchronous culture where employees are not required to be continuously present.
  • Really, every work-related interaction should supply as much detail as possible.

Remote teams face lots of unique challenges with engaging distributed employees and communicating effectively. Outside an office, there’s only so much detail you can provide on a call or using a digital whiteboard. Businesses often hire contractors for responsibilities that cannot be handled quickly, efficiently or cost-effectively in-house. With remote work offering contractors opportunities to work with businesses across the world, this article examines how the right mix of benefits can help you hire and retain superior talent. Failing to create a culture of documentation limits remote working. Remote working thrives on free access to knowledge and it gets hampered if team members have to clarify every issue over Slack and wait for a reply hours later.

How To Calculate Compensation For Remote Employees

Businesses can automate tasks to make managing remote teams easier for you. That means no spyware, tracking programs, or tracking working hours but rather trusting employees to default to action and stay responsive as a part of the team. Great remote management starts with giving employees the benefit and assuming everyone has good intentions and therefore shouldn’t be policed.

managing a remote team interview questions

Both of these have brands scrambling to reorient themselves and better serve their audiences. This is why it’s good to know where your potential candidate stands on these topics — they’ll likely shape the way we think and relate to one another for the foreseeable future. Just like in-person hiring, conducting remote interviews should be efficient and relatively painless for all parties.

Sponsor continuing education a self-improvement budget employees can spend on books, courses, classes, and conferences. Get all employees involved in conversations around the subject of inclusion. Working these 10 tactics into your company will not only help get you started on the path of inclusion but will help foster a long-term culture where everyone is accepted. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume the rest of the team is operating as altruistically as possible — you can’t do your best work if you default to questioning your coworkers’ every move.

How Do You Plan On Communicating With A Remote Team?

In such a scenario, managers often resort to offering remote workers a little more hand-holding and trying to communicate expectations to ensure productivity doesn’t drop. Before long, you may find yourself micromanaging your team without knowing it. Those managing remote teams have noted these concerns often; in reality, evidence shows that remote workers can be even more productive than their counterparts. Global businesses are typically not liable for corporate taxes wherever their employees are based, unless you cross a threshold known as permanent establishment. As a business hiring remote employees, you need to keep tabs on what can trigger permanent establishment so you can safely avoid local taxes whenever possible.

managing a remote team interview questions

With a PEO, you are chiefly responsible for compliance with local labor laws. An EOR shoulders that burden on your behalf, insulating you from much of the risk of employment. With a PEO, you are the legal employer, or at least the legal co-employer.

Create a well-rounded list of questions that cover their personality, background, and skillset. When hiring remote workers, it’s also good to consider if they’re in the same or similar time zone as your target audience. This is especially important if you plan to have many social media events where active community management and hosting is required.

If you’re a first-time manager, it can be even more challenging leading a team and keeping everyone aligned without a framework for engaging your team virtually. When onboarding contractors, have them sign all the relevant paperwork as well as undergo your onboarding routine to ensure you’re in touch with your organization’s fundamentals. That way, you’ll have a great workplace https://globalcloudteam.com/ where employees and contractors alike are in tune with the culture and doing their best work. American remote workers are subject to varying tax obligations depending on the location within our outside the States and their income level. Generally, remote workers — but citizens and residents — are only subject to federal taxes if they’re based in the United States.

The Best Jobs For Freelancers

Misunderstandings appear more often in online communication, rather than in regular dialogue. Part of developing rapport is associating with coworkers and other employees on a social level in addition to the Managing a Remote Team context of the workplace. Have a realistic idea of what you can expect from your remote team and when you can expect it. Putting yourself in your employees’ shoes is a useful way to manage your expectations.

EORs employ workers in other countries on your behalf, while PEOs require you to enter into a co-employment relationship. This article answers several questions related to employers of records, how they function, and why you might need one. Whenever you mention the word “ergonomic” most people skip to thoughts of pricey chairs that cost several thousand dollars, an ultrawide monitor, and a specced-out Mac.

managing a remote team interview questions

These interview questions for remote workers will cover the major components of your remote worker search, including their background and personality. There are ways you can help candidates mitigate this type of stress and put their best foot forward. In practice, this looks like entering the Zoom interview room five minutes early, choosing meeting times that are more convenient for the candidate, and having a meeting outline ready to go.

Ways To Improve Communication With Remote Teams

But as long as you focus on your taste you will create a home office that’s uniquely yours and helps you make the most of every day. This article explores eight key pieces of the home office puzzle you need to fix and how to build an ergonomic office space without breaking the bank. Building a home office can be a huge headache — especially when you’re on a budget. This article summarizes the best pieces you need to set up a workstation where you can feel productive.

Manage Expectations On Both Sides

Encourage your team to be specific and extensive with their communication. You’ll need focused exercises and activities to help your team get to know each other. Some of those face-to-face interactions that you’ll be missing include lunchroom breaks or after-hours drinking. For example, if you were working on building out an authentication feature, requirements might entail the different kinds of platforms a user can sign into your product with. It would be nice to know what’s been working and what hasn’t, right? Is essentially each member’s ability to work, i.e the total number of hours available and the percentage of time they can dedicate to each task.

Interview Questions For Remote Workers

Buffer works out compensation with a simple formula that factors base compensation for a role by local cost of living. Here are the six most common mistakes companies make when switching to a remote model so you can pinpoint them and fix them in your company. Building an equitable workplace will help create support and diversity for lasting success in any business. Define a reason for every meeting — Learn how to run successful remote meetings.

They are meant to help your remote team improve their process and catch roadblocks as early as possible, resulting in less friction. Without social interaction, they may seek out other distractions to quell their boredom. This can include scrolling through social media or watching television outside of breaks. If you want to manage a remote team, you must make sure to give them the space they need to do their work effectively. Often new hires will have tons of questions that you will need to answer.

Currently, digital communication is not an ideal option for the onboarding process. You can also advise your remote team to put their phone on silent to avoid responding to messages and notifications immediately. After building expectations, manage them by defining standards for your team. Set up a system where those involved will always be held accountable for those standards. Managing a remote team requires a constructive relationship with the people you are working with. Only when stay-at-home orders first went into effect around mid-March 2020 did employers truly encourage and/or plainly require their employees to work from home.

Pomodoro timers are a method of staying proactive via 25-minute working blocks divided by short break times. Being truly collaborative in this way strengthens engagement between yourself and the employees. Strong and intentional goals have a substantial impact on growing businesses.

Establishing A Company Culture

Your choices, then, are either to pay people as contractors or employing people through an EOR. If you want to work with full-time employees in other countries without breaking the bank to do it, your EOR can be your best friend. Hiring independent contractors offers businesses a lot of flexibility in an employment relationship. But misclassifying employees — even unintentionally — often attracts serious penalties and businesses must be proactive to ensure they adhere to labor regulations. Managing independent contractors working abroad is a simple, fast, and productive way to scale.

The biggest difference between managing remote teams and having employees at a central office is that your face-to-face interactions will be severely lacking. If you don’t have a local legal entity, you don’t need a PEO — you need an EOR. While both provide payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance services, as well as potentially stock options help, an EOR can help you hire in other countries without requiring you to set up there yourself. Without a local legal entity, you can’t actually hire employees in other countries.

This option also gives you access to the best talent in the world. You’ll want a good system to scale your hiring process, especially if you’re working with contractors in multiple countries. Using a contractor management platform lets you kickstart the whole process.

When you are managing a remote team, it can be harder for team members to learn new procedures because they aren’t able to watch and learn critical processes in-person. Managing remote teams is probably not one of your favorite subjects. But in recent months, phrases like ‘remote work’ and ‘work from home’ have dominated the subject matter of casual conversations. Remote employees should be comfortable using a wide range of platforms. Ask how the candidate will communicate with the team and how comfortable they are using different communication platforms. This will help you better understand how they communicate and collaborate with their team.

Likewise, email cannot serve as a single source of truth because it’s not cohesive. Different team members can have different versions of the same conversation and arrive at different conclusions. As a result, this can hurt productivity since a lot of time is spent trying to figure out the big picture from the various conversations on the same issue. But then, it can still be hard to get communication right with team members spread across the world — especially if you don’t have a guide to internal comms.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *