The remote work model spells a new beginning for entrepreneurs as it enables them to start small with minimal investment. In fact, you can launch a business without a physical setup by hiring a complete team of resources working from home. The chances of securing top talent are great because people love the flexibility and freedom of working remotely. However, you may fall short on the management and leadership front because overseeing a team without physical connectivity can be challenging. Things become even tougher when you lack experience. But you can follow these valuable leadership tips to drive your remote startup toward success.

Set clear and realistic goals

Good leadership begins with setting clear and realistic goals for your team, and they become even more crucial while leading a remote team. Your employees will likely be more productive when they have realistic targets to chase. They may even decide their own schedule and pace to achieve these goals. For example, you can provide actionable quality expectations and deadlines for projects to ensure the best performance. Regular check-in is equally vital as they show whether things are on track.

Assign responsibilities

Goal setting is only half the work when it comes to managing a remote startup team. You must also assign responsibilities to everyone on board to bring accountability into the picture. When people know what they need to do, they can hardly use ignorance as an excuse. Moreover, the team can accomplish its goals faster by working as a cohesive unit where everyone does their part of the work.

Leverage the right tools

Technology is perhaps the most critical aspect of leadership when launching and running a remote startup. You must look for the right tools to ensure good collaboration, secure access, and maximum productivity. For example, Remotetopc can help you facilitate secure and reliable remote PC access for your team members, regardless of location. Likewise, you can leverage tools for productivity, time management, project scheduling, and performance analysis.

Encourage regular communication

Effective and regular communication is the mainstay of success for hybrid businesses, and startups are no exception. While communication is crucial in all settings, it becomes even more significant when employees are not in the office. Be proactive about fostering constant communication as a business leader. In fact, you must encourage interactions beyond professional needs to drive good bonding and prevent isolation.

Respect boundaries and limitations

Although remote work offers more freedom and flexibility, it can often blur the boundaries between personal and professional lives. Successful business leaders ensure an optimal work-life balance for their remote teams by respecting the boundaries and limitations of their employees. Failing to do it can lead to burnout and loss of productivity, and both are detrimental to startups. Avoiding micromanagement, keeping realistic deadlines, and adapting to change are a few measures to prevent such situations.

Entrepreneurs leading remote startups need not worry about distance when managing their teams. Follow these tips to make the most of their productivity, and give your business a great start.

Author Bio: Steve Rose is a professional content writer, working for Outreach Monks for seven years. He holds expertise in business and tech niches and, thus, delivers content that offers new and trending information in an easy format.

The working world is significantly different from what it was a few years ago. Remote work arrangements, particularly, are growing in popularity among workers and becoming more permanent in companies worldwide.

But the hard part about remote work is ensuring your team is as communicative and collaborative as possible to fuel a productive operation.

Ultimately, increasing, maintaining, and celebrating remote collaboration is a must. Before we offer some tips on encouraging and supporting collaboration in a remote workforce, let’s assess the importance of collaboration in general.

How Valuable is Collaboration?

As mentioned above, remote work is tough. Mainly because getting your team to communicate, collaborate, and work productively requires intention and effort on everyone’s part.

Remote work also comes with some isolation and loneliness that can diminish the spirit of innovation, creativity, and togetherness in your team. That’s where authentic collaboration can play an integral part.

Collaboration is valuable, specifically in a remote workforce, because it creates a well-oiled crew, no matter each team member’s location. When your remote team collaborates, it brings them closer, which boosts morale and the quality of each team member’s work.

In addition, collaboration enables the formation of a global workforce. You can take your company to another level with the perspectives, skill sets, and experiences of a diverse group of employees.

With genuine collaboration, a remote workforce, or any workforce for that matter, can excel.

Four Tips for Encouraging and Maintaining Collaboration in a Remote Workforce

As remote work becomes more common, you need to create an environment and company culture that supports it, starting by improving collaboration. Here are six tips to increase and maintain remote collaboration.

Lean on technology

Without the right tech tools, facilitating collaboration and communication in a remote team is impossible. Because remote employees work in different places, at different times, and in different ways, technology is that much more important to keep everyone on the same page.

Implement video conferencing and real-time chat tools to keep communication consistent. Use project management software, so everyone knows their roles and responsibilities in each project. A customer relationship management software solution and content management system are also helpful. 

Even enabling things like e-signatures is vital for maintaining remote collaboration because they’re a huge part of keeping projects progressing.

Another tip for encouraging and maintaining collaboration in a remote team is to foster open communication.

Open communication is critical

Open communication is critical if you want to increase and maintain remote collaboration. Supporting employees that work outside the office requires intention, particularly in how, why, and when you communicate with each one.

Set and document communication expectations within your team to ensure everyone knows who to contact for various kinds of support during their remote work journey. It’ll also help everyone understand how to best communicate with each team member to initiate effective collaboration.

Your communication expectations should include:

• Each employee’s title, role, and contact information
• A little on each employee’s preferred communication methods
• The communication channels and platforms your team uses
• What each communication channel and platform is used for

Feedback is essential for collaboration too.

Encourage an ongoing conversation about bettering collaboration

Every remote workforce will require different things to make collaboration a top priority. Asking for and listening to feedback directly from your employees can help you figure out what those things are. 

Ask your employees what a collaborative remote team looks like and their suggestions for bringing that vision to life in your company. Meet with your remote employees regularly. Do group and individual meetings to open up a two-way conversation about how to better collaborate and communicate within the team.

Also, grow personal relationships with your employees so that it’s easier for them to be honest with you about what they are and aren’t getting in terms of collaboration and support. That way, you can give them what they really need to work together better with their coworkers.

Our last tip for bettering collaboration in your remote workforce is to do everything you can to enhance team camaraderie and connection.

Enable team camaraderie and connection

Fostering a high level of collaboration in your remote team is even more challenging when your employees don’t like, let alone know, each other.

But if you commit to enabling team camaraderie and connection, your remote employees can get to know each other and form genuine personal relationships that prompt a streamlined workflow.

Encourage your team to connect beyond work and nurture authentic relationships. Set up social hours, remote lunch rooms, and separate chat channels for less formal conversations at work. Monthly team dinners, bonding activities, and other events inspiring team camaraderie are also brilliant ideas.

When you encourage your team to get to know each other outside of work, they tend to collaborate more effectively while at work.

Conclusion

Collaboration is incredibly valuable in a remote workforce. Without it, your team won’t ever reach the level of productivity and engagement you want it to. No collaboration also leads to less happy workers, which can negatively impact your ability to retain them.

So, implement the tips above to encourage and increase collaboration in your remote team. It will ensure each team member feels their best and does their best for your company.

As the world increasingly moves towards a future of remote work, employees and employers alike have had to make numerous adjustments. One such change relates to remote worker productivity metrics. When employees come to their workplaces, their supervisors can directly observe whether they make the most of their time on the clock or not. However, you may know that doing it is not so straightforward with more people working at home.

Patient Feedback Could Help Measure Worker Productivity

It’s not necessarily typical for patients to receive requests to fill out surveys once they attend in-person doctor visits. However, the increase in telemedicine has made researchers especially interested in how patients feel about receiving care remotely. Plus, it’s easy to push a feedback request to a person immediately after an appointment ends, either directly on-screen or via email.

A recent study of patients who received telemedicine care during the COVID-19 pandemic asked respondents how they felt about the quality of care. The results showed that 79% either agreed or strongly agreed that they were very satisfied with it. Then, 88% of patients said their providers engaged in the session within 15 minutes of the scheduled appointment. Another notable finding was that 84% of patients felt their physicians spent enough time with them.

Participating in a telehealth visit does not always mean the provider is working remotely, but it often does. For example, this study showed that 63.6% of medical professionals had conducted their appointments from home.

A physician’s supervisor could monitor patient sentiments to get a good idea of remote worker productivity in such cases. For example, if patients complain that the doctor seemed rushed or preoccupied during a virtual visit, those are bad signs. The same is true if a provider is consistently very late for appointments. One of the top advantages of telemedicine care for patients is that they can drastically cut down on wait times and often see providers immediately.

Cultural Differences Can Shape Time Perceptions From a Remote Team

Remote working has many associated perks. For example, research showed that if everyone who could worked from home half the time, it would cut 119 billion highway miles traveled per year.

Plus, a remote team could give organizations greater access to people with the required expertise despite geographical boundaries. A medical team in a rural region could get advice from a foremost expert in a rare infectious disease, even if that person is on another continent.

However, remote work can make cultural differences more apparent, too. For example, people’s cultures often shape how they perceive time. The variations could extend to whether someone prefers punctuality over flexibility and if they become more motivated by short- or long-term goals.

These variations mean it’s shortsighted to hold each employee to the same remote worker productivity metrics. Consider a case where a person always meets their deadlines but sometimes has errors in the work. A colleague might occasionally miss time-based milestones by minor amounts but virtually never have mistakes in their submissions. That scenario suggests that one person prioritizes getting stuff done on time no matter what, while the other works more slowly to avoid quality issues.

Representatives from Gallup recommend using three universal performance domains to measure the productivity of hybrid and remote teams:

• Assessing how well a person can set and meet goals (A reflection of their personal work)
• Checking how well a person can effectively partner with others (A reflection of their teamwork capabilities)
• Translating how a person’s work brings consequences (A reflection of their commitment to customers)

These three areas suit the realities of remote work while accounting for cultural differences and other variations. Some companies that have fully or mostly remote teams already use them when examining employees’ workforce performance.

Managers Should Avoid Making Assumptions About Apparent Productivity Declines

The surge in remote work left many executives searching for the best ways to ensure their employees stay on task while working from home. Many ultimately chose software that takes periodic screenshots, tracks keystrokes, and monitors mouse movements.

However, a 2021 survey from YouGov of the British workforce found that 59% of people would not work for employers that used remote monitoring software. Instead, 58% preferred team or manager check-ins, while 51% agreed with managers evaluating their work to measure productivity.

Any supervisors feeling concerned about a worker’s less-than-impressive metrics should remember that there’s more than one way to measure worker productivity. An open, supportive discussion could get to the bottom of what’s wrong.

It’s also important to remember that software tools don’t accurately reflect productivity all the time. For example, if a person has a team conference over Zoom, they might rarely or never use their keyboard and mouse. That could make it appear to a time-tracking program that the worker was idle.

Inadequate resources may be to blame, too. One study compiled the remote working experiences of 128 people employed for the United Kingdom’s National Health Service during the pandemic who had medical conditions that made staying home the safest option or lived with vulnerable family members. Many people in that situation tried to continue contributing by working from home.

The research showed that most workers — 99 of the 128 — had roles that let them get duties done remotely. However, 21 of the 99 expressed that they lacked resources to do optimal work from home. Those statistics highlight how important it is for supervisors to specifically check that remote employees have everything they need. Otherwise, those workforce members could continually encounter challenges that make managers reach the wrong conclusions about productivity.

Tracking Remote Worker Productivity Requires New Methods

Managing a remote team requires doing some things differently. Some of them relate to how supervisors track a person’s time on the clock. Look at different metrics or at using alternative methods to measure how well workers use their available work hours. The ideas here can get people thinking about and applying appropriate approaches.