Tips for Your Business
Top 7 Virtual Teams Challenges and Solutions for Businesses
Last year’s outbreak of COVID-19 made a very profound impact on the contemporary business landscape. One of the most significant transitions we have seen was the rise of virtual teams and the massive switch to work from home.
How big of a portion? According to a recent survey, 80% of company leaders plan to allow employees to work remotely, while 47% will enable employees to work from home full-time. This can be best described as tectonic changes.
Of course, all significant overhauls that envelop this scale must include various challenges, obstacles, and adversities. In this article, we will cover some of the most notorious problems and try to find practical solutions for dealing with them.
Compromised infrastructure
When they are at the workplace, employees are working with an infrastructure that’s already been laid out and can get support from other departments. Moving workers out of this controlled environment to their homes leaves them with their own resources. Lack of necessary tools, varying software versions, and different software platforms are only some of the problems that undermine effective collaboration and productivity. One of the most straightforward workarounds for this obstacle can be found in platform-agnostic cloud tools, where updates are passed to all end users simultaneously. Most of these platforms usually feature built-in collaborative tools, making them even more suitable for virtual teams.
Communication hierarchy
In a physical workplace, communication develops very spontaneously, and answers can be found through chatter and brainstorming as much as established communication hierarchy. In the virtual environment, however, a lack of clear and transparent hierarchy often creates clutter where critical information is often indiscernible from jabber. In order to avoid this problem, you need to establish firm rules about what needs to be reported to whom, when, and through what channels. This way, your workers will always know where to get relevant info without unnecessary delays and idling. In turn, all of your processes will be sped up and run more efficiently.
Poor worker engagement
These are two factors that take the hardest hit by relocating workers from offices to their homes. Without any motivational tools and supervision of their superiors, your employees can slip into idling and start losing productivity. This is an issue that needs to be cut in its roots. Fortunately enough, the gravity of this problem gave birth to tools for employee engagement explicitly designed to address problems related to virtual teams like check-ins, notices, scheduling, rosters, administration, and onboarding. Most essential processes are kept under one integrated umbrella and employee voices are allowed to be heard. Both these factors have a very positive impact on morale.
Response time and accountability
The problem of accountability is not related exclusively to virtual teams and remote working. But some mistakes are easier to trace in the digital environment, and unread emails, unopened messages, and other invisible walls make coming to the bottom of the problem even harder. Although this issue can’t ever be rooted out, you can, at least, do your best to cut down the response times as much as possible. Enforce the rules where priority emails will need to be responded to without any delays. Also, you can set up separate communication channels only for problems of this sort.
Lack of trust in leadership
In normal circumstances, inspired leadership keeps the workforce high-spirited, motivated, and on track with current obligations. Translating this sort of leadership into a virtual environment is very hard even if management and staff have a personal or professional history, as in numerous contemporary startups. Since you will undoubtedly lack this inspiring personal touch, you should try to bind the workers closer to the goals of your company, perform internal marketing actions that will promote your mission statement among the staff, and motivate workers to take action in building the company future by incentives and chances for promotion.
Failing motivation
Of course, failing motivation is not only the result of absent leadership. Remote working simply doesn’t provide a sufficiently stimulating environment to help your employees reach their maximum potential. That is why you need to find another way to keep them stimulated. Do your best then to provide them with to-do lists for every new workday or at least ask them to submit their own. Short, specific, and feasible goals will help your employees plow through their obligations much faster. Offering small incentives like, for instance, leaving the workplace earlier if the tasks are finished will undoubtedly give them an additional reason to stop procrastinating and tackle their obligations head-on.
Absence of support
Last but not least, we have to mention the lack of support employees get when they are working from home. In the previous section, we have noted that most of the software issues can be prevented by adopting the Cloud technology where maintenance and updates are the responsibility of the service provider. Even so, you should do your best to build a comprehensive knowledge base where your staff will be able to find all the answers regarding technical issues and procedures without having to lose time by referring to higher-ups.
We hope these few examples gave you some general idea about the challenges startups are facing while building virtual teams and transitioning to a remote working model. Although telecommuting got a great boost with the outbreak of COVID-19, this model gained traction much earlier and will not stop developing even after the outbreak is over. With things as they are, the best we can do is to join the early adopters and make the transition as painless as possible.