How To Effectively Manage A Remote Workforce

Being an effective manager is difficult enough in any circumstances. But what if your workforce is scattered all over and not in the same location all the time? There are very specific challenges in managing a remote workforce. Here we are going to go through these challenges and give some tips and tools to be able to deal with these situations well.

Personnel Management

When sending people out to work on location, the one thing that is key above all others is trust, if you can’t trust them then management is going to be near impossible. Beyond trust though you are going to have to have a system in place for communication and problem-solving.

You can get pretty good software these days that can allow updates to be made in real-time on job progress etc. if they are working in a role that demands various visits to locations each day.

Collaborative Working

For home workers, collaborative working solutions are needed. How to share work on projects and access files can be achieved by cloud storage solutions such as Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. Video conferencing via Skype or WhatsApp are other modern ways of getting things done and there are still the traditional ways of getting in touch such as phone and email.

Time & Schedule Management

Keeping track of the schedule is going to be a headache if not managed properly. Thankfully, as long as you are organized, then this is not going to be a huge issue. There are certain tools that you can use when doing this and thankfully, these days there are so many pieces of software that can assist you in this, but you need to be careful to use one that is versatile enough and packed with as many  features as possible while still being user-friendly, this is what you need from an employee schedule maker.

Data Security

Data security is important for any business, you need to keep financial records, employee and customer data all secure and secret, as well as being good for your reputation there are data protection laws that need to be adhered to.

Firstly you need to have a code of conduct where employees are aware of their data protection obligations and also systems where the data will be secure, it is important to not allow the use of insecure methods to send sensitive documents, such as messenger or Gmail.

Customer Relations

You won’t be able to see how the remote workers are interacting with the clients, so it’s important to be able to keep on top of customer relations and ensure that people are happy with your service.

A good idea is to send customers an online survey immediately following every job, this way you can easily and quickly find out if your people are providing the level of service you would expect of them while out in the field. Happy customers, after all, are the making or breaking of your business success.

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Interesting related article:

• What is teleworking?