The way companies and their customers do business is changing. This requires companies to change the way they operate as well. With the advent of the global economy, more and more job-based responsibilities are able to be handled remotely. This has led to a major increase in freelance or company-based work from all over the world. As a result, many companies now rely on virtual employees in numerous different locations.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By ESB Professional
Making sure that you can have efficient and instant access and interaction between management and supervisors and the employees, as well as those virtual employees with their in-office counterparts, is essential to making sure that your business operations continue to run smoothly. Here are four issues that companies often deal with concerning their remote and virtual team members:
Communication
Without a doubt, the most crucial ingredient in keeping your company’s purpose on course is clear communication and interaction between employees. When team members in the physical offices have difficulty getting in instant contact with remote workers, critical factors or timing for a project or customer may be thrown off.
Shared inbox software is a fantastic all-in-one customizable intercommunications system that can be integrated into your existing system to connect all of your in-house, as well as remote and virtual employees for instant access and up-to-the-second inclusion in all job-related areas.
Motivation
Sometimes when a person wakes up in the morning, showers, eats breakfast, goes and cleans up and grooms, gets dressed, and then walks into the basement or spare bedroom and sits down in front of a computer to start working, it can be very easy to lose motivation and become lethargic. Offering more team-based and collaborative projects between real-world and virtual world employees can help significantly with this.
Idea Creation
Not only do virtual team members not have the office staff to chat around with all day and develop ideas or improvements with, but they also don’t have other remote employees to do it with either. That means all of those virtual team members that are working by themselves have all of those ideas that could help the company just waiting to be developed if only they had more interaction with others who were also invested in those same benefits.
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Both solutions previously mentioned (shared inbox software, more collaborative projects) would also help with this, but even better would be creating smaller groups or teams with your remote employees so at least you can have them brainstorming with a few other team members regularly.
Collaboration
Even though we have already mentioned this before, it deserves its own further examination. Collaboration is not only difficult because of the lack of integrated and interactive systems and software, but it is also difficult because of the lack of familiarity that virtual team members and office workers have with themselves and each other. If you never have in-and-out of house workers partner together for projects, when they eventually do, it won’t go efficiently.
Scheduling online recreational or other relaxed atmosphere interactions can help with that. Even little things like live-streaming staff or office meetings that might involve certain individuals or departments which are remote-based, and letting them be involved in them can go a long way in making everyone feel more relaxed with each other.
