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An increasing number of industries and businesses turned to manage remote teams over the past few years. So now remote culture comes as a solid backbone and a core value for most organizations. But usually, for HRs it takes significant efforts to hire remote teams seamlessly.
Moreover, a progressive hiring strategy means nothing if you can’t retain and manage your remote team effectively. In this guide, we’ll help you navigate the major thorny problems and offer some tangible steps to assemble your remote team.
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Before you embrace the remote work culture, let’s weigh its advantages and drawbacks that you may encounter on the path.
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Three years after the outbreak of the pandemic were enough to evaluate the productivity of distributed teams. Statistics reveal only an uptick in productivity: 77% of workers and 68% of managers surveyed by CoSo Cloud and Upwork confirmed that. Besides it, remote work improves time-to-hire.
When you tap into the global labor market, you expand your talent pool by default. That is why remote-first companies generally hire 3 times faster than others, according to Owl Labs research. But it’s not only the time that you save.
The shift toward WFH policy results in growing business savings. On average full-time remote team saves $10,000/employee/year in real estate costs.
For instance, IBM decreased real estate costs by $50 million in 2021 by reducing some office space, cleaning services, parking spaces, food, and property tax. New hires also find lucrative benefits of remote work.
The remote setting is an important incentive for prospective candidates. Data shows that three-quarters of workers expect their employers to embrace workplace flexibility.
Failing that, 1 out of 3 workers, would rather leave an employer rather than stay, according to Flexjobs data. So, today it’s hard to imagine another future of work. But given all the advantages, don’t rush to plunge into a new remote setting.
Let’s face potential obstacles on your way.
Working from home, employees can feel distracted and disconnected from the team. It’s a risk. Moreover, the more geographically dispersed is the team, the less effective the autocratic leadership and formal hierarchy become.
For most managers, it would be hard to supervise team members and maintain their engagement. To prevent this scenario, a team leader has to update project management tactics and adopt an asynchronous work model. But other specialists also need to restructure their mode of work.
Income tax and social security laws vary greatly from country to country. Learning all the compliance requirements takes extra time and effort from your HR team. At this point, you lose time. But the major challenge arises when you hire people from several countries.
In these conditions, recruiters have to align multiple tax calendars to avoid severe penalties. That’s why companies implement industry-specific software and apps to track all of that. As one of these end-to-end systems, Juggl can help you remove compliance headaches.
Distributed teams heavily rely on technology. To manage remote hiring in a smooth and transparent way, organizations put money into additional applications.
Subscription to a sharable codespace, task management tools, payroll consolidation solutions: that is all you have to figure out prior to setting up a remote ecosystem.
Looking ahead, the remote model is here to stay, as experts highlight. For that reason, we suggest you start strengthening your organization and harness abundant opportunities related to remote work. The strategies below will assist you in establishing a remote talent pipeline.
Recruiting remote employees seems easy but it entails numerous nuances. It’s particularly the truth if you want to hire remote developers. Let’s figure it out step by step.
Remote work, in essence, differs from an office job. Successful candidates should possess specific traits that allow them to be efficient and autonomous. Besides of it, businesses mention other peculiarities to attract decent remote candidates. Let’s discover them.
Defining the traits of your ideal candidate is the first thing in your plan. Not only job-related skills you may point out. Soft skills play a crucial role in remote conditions. The way a person communicates influences the transparency and efficiency of your team.
To help you, we single out the following key qualities:
Micromanagement isn’t built for remote work. Find trustworthy candidates that are responsible for their assignments. Otherwise, you'll waste more time teaching a half-backed specialist.
The tech industry escalates at an unpredictable pace. Make sure your new hire is eager to adapt to changes and stay on top of them.
Working from home doesn’t mean that team members communicate less. Remote workers, on the contrary, should initiate conversion and clarify every controversial question. Misreading may cost you time and money.
However, a job description serves not just to mention key requirements. It sells your company. To convey a compelling job description, learn from others’ mistakes that spoil the first impression.
Although remote work suggests many benefits, people can feel disconnected from the team working from home. Anyway, humans are social creatures. In other words, outlining corporate traditions will make your job description more convincing.
In a few sentences mention how you support team spirit. For example, you can hold online games twice a month or offer virtual coffee time for a team.
Another important aspect is correlated with management efficiency. It’s an especially valuable point for experienced applicants. Try to describe in a few words what makes your team productive.
Hiring globally, you may triple the influx of job applications. You can cover various platforms for remote job seekers. Meanwhile, make sure your HR department has time to absorb and filter all these applications.
By accessing more sources of candidates, your recruitment team spends more time storing CVs from various bases and sharing them with team leads and the CEO. Double data entry inevitably steals the time of your recruiters. Any solution?
To easily compare foreign candidates, we suggest you use the Juggle platform. It allows you to store and review collaboratively all resumes from different sources.
The next step in recruitment entails a background check.
Any employer doesn’t want to hire a pig in a poke. However, lying on resumes is quite usual. Every second candidate makes up some story about their skills, past experience, and education, as a survey denotes. But you can be smarter.
Validate employment history through an internet search, social media, or contacting candidate references. Even if it takes extra time, it’s a worthwhile investment in your team.
Then we move forward to the interviewing stage.
Remote interviewing doesn’t differ too much from on-site conversation. Job-related and behavioral questions are still the same. Nevertheless, there is a temptation to overspend time on unnecessary questions and discourage candidates with too formal conversation.
During an interview, candidates judge your company only by your conversation. On remote, you can’t show them a cozy office or cheerful colleagues. So it’s your show time: you can rely only on your presentation skills. To improve their experience, you may add to the conversation:
To make sure your interview is engaging and up-to-date, have a look at the winning strategies in this guide. If you want to make your interview more insightful, use these remote job interview questions.
Candidate experience doesn’t end in an online meeting room. The pre and post-interview interaction also matters. That is why try to avoid the following downfalls:
These issues appear as a result of a permanent recruitment burden. But you can solve these struggles.
The universal recipe for smooth hiring implies well-thought-out tools. The more steps the solution automates the lighter the process becomes for you. We suggest considering the following tools:
Juggl – Yes, that’s us! Juggle is designed to help you fill tech roles faster. We assemble your perfect IT team with one tool for expert vetting, interviewing, and global payroll. You access analytics and a complete overview of the process. So you can free your time for strategic decisions. See how easy recruitment can be on free 30 min. online demo.
Calendly – a tool that helps to schedule interviews. With Calendly, you say goodbye to endless emails sent back and forth. Your hiring responsible and candidates simply set their availability in timeslots in the common online calendar.
Talview – this app gives you various options to asses your candidates online during the interviews. Want some code or STEM tests? Talview provides them. After examining a talent, you access comprehensive reports for your recruitment needs.
GoodHire – the solution facilitates background checks of your candidates across many locations. As simple as you can imagine, it provides you with at-a-glance results.
Once you’ve selected a perfect talent, you can go on with onboarding.
At this stage, creating a meaningful connection with a new employee is the key. The reason is simple: well-conducted onboarding prevents the company’s workforce from attrition.
It’s hardly possible to succeed without a structured onboarding policy. We’ll boil down several major aspects to focus on.
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At any rate, remote workers want to feel a sense of belonging to the group. Sadly, colleagues' greetings in a team chat can’t fully substitute an empathetic handshake in a cozy office space. So why is a community important?
That feeling makes your employees more satisfied with the job. To help your new employee to get into your team, foster connections with key colleagues. Arrange as many collaborative meetings for your new employee’s first week as possible.
In addition, come up with casual or semi-formal topics in video calls. That will also increase the sense of belonging.
When you see a newbie can’t overcome an obstacle with tasks, you can make two steps forward and offer to help. Time is always needed to get comfortable with their responsibilities and your expectations.
New employees are especially sensitive to how an employer fulfills its obligations. Timely payments inspire trust better than any word.
Remote workers perceive clarifications around salary as a baseline agreement. But before you could answer an employee’s questions, you need to figure out complex international labor laws.
Each country has different tax calendars and compliance requirements. This complexity creates room for errors. Here are the most frequent mistakes in global payroll:
The larger your distributed team, the more payroll data you have to keep and manage. We suggest you use both payroll software and professional global payroll services to consolidate all payments for different geographies. For instance, Juggl handles all these issues.
To properly assess a candidate, it is not enough to spend several hours on an interview. Clarity comes up with real-life challenges at work.
But you can evaluate your talent by asking these questions:
One-on-one meetings are also helpful. On probation, recruiters and team leads may sustain one or two face-to-face meetings per month.
After each month of probation, you can schedule an evaluation session with a new employee. In such a meeting, both you and a worker provide feedback about his or her inputs and obstacles. Plus, it’s a perfect time to collect insights about your onboarding program! To make your novice feel great during probation, use this guide.
Before every evaluation session, you sum up an employee’s performance. Don’t hesitate to take their job description and literally gauge how the new hire performs functions point by point.
If you’re satisfied with the results, you can set other realistic goals together.
If the talent is straining to complete duties, you can discuss methods to improve performance. This article is designed to help you.
Next, let’s discuss essential aspects when managing remote teams.
Working separated from their team members, managers face a number of challenges. The obstacles derive from the lack of face-to-face supervision, employees’ social isolation, and distractions at home. The array of project management tips can help you withstand the challenges.
Leading remote teams, you may miss the visibility of employees’ work. That situation caused delays in the progress. But as a manager, the transparency culture starts with you.
Convey to your employees the “why” that stands behind critical business decisions. Make them understand the company’s goals. A product roadmap and burndown charts would assist in bringing clarity about the overall process.
To track the performance, don’t hesitate to set specific goals and expectations for each employee. If possible, outline not only short but also long-term expectations.
Collaboration tools for remote teams can assist you:
Project management tools: Jira, Asana, Zenhub.
Productivity trackers: Worksection, ActivTrak, CloudDesk.
Managing teams remotely doesn’t guarantee employee engagement by default. More often remote employees feel less belonging to their company than those who work in an office. As a result, turnover arises, and the quality of work declines. How can you fix it?
The first thing you can do is establish a regular meeting schedule. There are no hard and fast rules for the number of check-ins per week. We will explore several options.
If you run a team that works more or less at the same timezone, you can adopt daily standup meetings. They are quick, typically no longer than 15 minutes. It can assist in keeping everyone aware of what other team members are doing.
If your remote team consolidates people from different time zones, you would rather prefer another model. Instead of gathering daily, your teammates can write a quick recap of what they did yesterday in the team chat. If you opt for this strategy, it would be enough to make a group video call once a week.
But this option is applicable not for all kinds of teams. If your teamwork is underpinned by thoughtful planning and project management linchpins, so go for it. Some projects, however, require more verbal, face-to-face interaction to achieve a deceased outcome.
A team lead either micromanages team members or confers them with greater flexibility. The second, autonomous option is more favorable for a remote setting.
Nevertheless, you have to understand how to do it right. Otherwise, your subordinates and the processes will get out of your control.
To find a sweet spot between transparency and flexibility, you can try out sharing tasks and fostering initiatives in the group according to the following strategies.
Traditionally, an employee handles the same set of activities. However, after a while it reinforces disengagement. You will see a positive change, allowing your remote workers to delve into areas of responsibility for each other.
Rotating the activities or responsibilities between team members, you‘ll stimulate everyone to gain new knowledge and skills. It also has a beneficial effect on a project. When someone takes a leave, you’ve always got a replacement.
You can check how it works in your workplace by applying rotations for updating sprint/project dashboards.
Tasks assignment is another branch you can shake up. If your team involves interchangeable specialists, you can allow them to choose the tasks by themselves.
Such behavior would help them feel empowered and responsible in a bigger way. However, this method will work out if you’re already confident in your team members.
Company-wide meetings
All-hands meeting draws a great opportunity to keep everyone on the same page. This kind of virtual event gathers employees, leaders, and stakeholders to share business updates, celebrate milestones, and ask questions.
The size of the company defines the content of the meeting. If you have several regional affiliations, it’s a chance to foster interconnectivity between them.
But an all-hands meeting shouldn’t be a large conference. It’s up to you how deeply you will discuss particular topics. Two times per month is a good regularity to make everybody aware of the company’s news.
Remote team games
To support your team's morale, don’t rely just on smooth project management. Informal activities, like collaboration tools for remote teams, would foster team spirit. Cultivating trust in the group will pay you off in the long run.
It would be a good idea to host remote team-building activities. Bi-monthly game nights can help your colleagues make friends even from behind a screen.
Business psychologists report that in a remote workplace, people are prone to work harder than in an office. They are inspired to get the job done quickly to spare more time with friends and family. But in fact, such behavior increases stress and anxiety. By the end of the project, you’ll have a demotivated employee with low productivity.
On the other hand, managers can also easily fall into the trap of assuming overwork as a new norm. Nevertheless, in the long run, it’s a zero-sum game. Taking the following steps, you can reverse the negative curve:
As you can see, there is a whole bunch of things you have to manage to attract candidates from all over the world. But the temporary limitations in learning international payroll regulations and other related topics are just parts of the journey. Every growing company goes through it.
If you’re interested in building an effective remote team, but not sure where to start, read how you can leverage easy-to-use Juggl tool for your goals. Cheers!
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