If a big part of your day to day involves managing a big group of employees, there’s a good chance that some of them are managed online. More and more businesses are employing people remotely, which calls for a different kind of employee management.
If a good percentage of your employees are remote and you’ve found it difficult to keep track of them, don’t worry – we’ve got five tips for managing your employees online. Let’s take a look.
1. Treat Your Remote Employees Like Locals
It sounds counterintuitive, but one of the best tips for managing your employees remotely is to treat the ones that are online like they’re right next to you, and addressing the ones right next to you like they’re miles away.
This means that you need to give your remote employees as many ways to get in touch and communicate with you as possible. Your local employees get face time with you almost every day, while your remote employees don’t. This is why it’s essential to make them feel like they have every resource necessary to stay in touch.
2. Be Regular About Your Engagement
Again, just like you should treat your remote employees like they’re local, you should also be regular about when you communicate with them.
Make sure that you can touch base with them at least once a day. Additionally, it’s wise to schedule a meeting that can be face to face, whether this is possible on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. This constant effort to engage with your remote workers will help keep them committed.
3. Try an Employee Monitoring Software
If your employees work remotely, then there’s a good chance that they spend quite a bit of their workday on the internet. They’ll have ways of accessing work software and schedules, which means that it is fairly easy to monitor their online activity.
Using something like an employee monitoring software is a great way to stay on top of your remote employees so that you can ensure their productivity is where it needs to be.
4. Find Employees You Can Trust
The last thing you want to be doing when you employ remote workers is to worry about them all day, concerned that they may not be staying on task. While there is no bulletproof method of hiring people that are completely trustworthy, it is important to try and find candidates that show a lot of promise in this area.
A lot of their roles involve integrity. This is why it pays to employ people who have demonstrated this in past roles.
5. Have Set Goals
Remote employees can’t knock on your office door a few times a day and check-in with you about a certain task or project. This is why it’s essential that you’re clear when communicating what they need to do, so there’s little room for questions or issues.
Try breaking down their tasks into smaller, more achievable goals that allow them to go away for a bit and not be in touch.
It’s never easy juggling employee management, but it can be especially challenging if you have some that work remotely. It doesn’t have to be stressful, though, and with these tips, you can make it that much easier.