The good news is, with a relatively basic understanding of workplace culture, you can anticipate these differences and avoid problems. In some cases, team members may have never met each other face-to-face and this has all kinds of subconscious effects on trust between them. Managers worry that workers aren’t completing work, while workers have a range of concerns, including whether they’ll be paid on time (or at all, in some cases). TrueNorth One of the reasons many managers don't approve of remote work is they fear employees will slack off without that physical, in-person oversight. No more after-hours emails interrupting your dinner. In many ways, Slack is the simplest collaboration tool your team and this is credit to how good a job it does of simplifying communications essentials. Also, the coffee rocks in both countries. This ensures that there are clear expectations in place, regardless of how and where your team works. But in spite of these and many other challenges, all manners of stats have shown that remote work is here to stay. That takes care of the software – now all you need to do is make sure you’ve got the right management in place. Otherwise, you constantly feel like you’ve never done enough and it’s hard to switch off when you’re not working. The more challenging cultural differences to manage are the ones that have the potential to cause offence. To hit big targets, you’ve got to make sure all the smaller tasks are getting completed in a timely manner. With this in mind, you can see why it’s so important that you set achievable targets for each day and routinely hit those targets. When you talk, people only get one chance to understand everything but they can read text at their own pace, read it multiple times if necessary and use a dictionary for any words they’re not familiar with. However, managing a remote team comes with challenges that can affect business operations and overall productivity. If you’re not convinced that trust has an important role to play in teamwork, turn your attention to the extensive research on teamwork in Google's Aristotle Project. You’ll spend less time training your team and your teammates will bring a level of professionalism that elevates your product or service. When you’ve got a remote team of workers from around the world, you’re also likely going to have a rich mix of language and cultural backgrounds coming together on projects. It can be as simple as encouraging remote contractors to stop by the New York City office in the event of traveling to the city for any reason, even a family vacation. I’m not particularly proud to admit it but by creating short work sessions in Serene and seeing that countdown timer, I find myself remotivated every time I look at the clock to see how much time is left (or isn’t). We’ve looked at ten of the most common remote work challenges in this article and solutions to overcome them. Join our exclusive early-adopter Slack community, to help shape the future of our ventures & get early access to new products. Because the truth is that managing a remote team can be quite challenging, especially when you want to do “business as usual” and have your employees work in a way that makes them feel like they’re working toward the same goals. Building trust is difficult for remote managers and team members. To get a more real-time look at team progress, you’ll want a project management tool like Status Hero. As soon as the session has passed the half-way margin, I get this burst of incentive to make sure I complete everything before the timer hits zero. When teams work remotely, it isn’t always easy to foster open communication. Distractions are another productivity killer that can turn remote working into a nightmare and compromise team progress. It can also do the same for specific websites insides browser apps to reveal which pages are holding up progress. These short bursts make it easier to keep focus and take regular, short breaks after each session. Thankfully, there are tools for just about every challenge a remote team manager could experience. First, there are tools you can use online to help make scheduling a call, video conference, or meeting with remote teams easier. Automation Insider, Startup Marketing For example, I’ve worked with a number people in Japan and Korea where workplace expectations are wildly different from the UK. Technical challenges. They don’t really give you live feedback or tell you how productive team members are being while they work on tasks. Above all, everyone needs to understand that language ability is never something someone should be criticised for or made to feel inadequate about. Slack has established itself as the go-to communication platform for remote teams – and for good reason. It is particularly challenging because when working from home (or any other place than the company’s office), you do not have the chance to talk to people during a coffee break or when you need to discuss a task or project. This isn’t somewhere you work and then later sleep or occasionally play guitar. Staying motivated is another common challenge reported by remote workers and I think this essentially comes down to being unsupervised. The platform prompts team members to provide quick “check-in” details about what they’re currently working on so you can see what everyone’s up to at any given time. About the author: Levi Olmstead is Head of Community and SEO at G2, a B2B software and services review site with over 650,000 real-user reviews. People working from home or on the move face their own unique set of challenges when it comes to getting things done and fitting work into their personal lives. For instance, if you want to foster a culture of open communication, remote team members need to be able to communicate with everyone, including the CEO, with a virtual “open door” policy. Add this to the freedom remote working gives your team members (maybe they have to or prefer to work in the evenings, for example) and there are no guarantees everyone is going to be switched on when you need them. When your nearest colleague works a thousand miles away, you can’t get up from your desk to visit them to collaborate on a project. Sadly, it’s only available for Android and I wish I could suggest an alternative for iOS but I’m not aware of one that allows you to schedule notifications in quite the same way. In this article, we’re going to look at ten of the most common remote work challenges and solutions to overcome them. Culture comes with challenges that come with managing a remote team comes with many benefits, shuts... 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