Building a new business to a top-industry earner status is no easy task. Business owners have to deal with several issues, including renting or purchasing office spaces and furniture, managing utility bills, and maintaining physical infrastructure. These expenses compete with money allocated for talents and the actual work, making it difficult to keep a balance between the two.
Many small businesses have withered because carrying this burden when your business is making little money from its efforts is daunting. Enter remote working. Remote working has been in existence for a long time, but the COVID-19 pandemic and its restrictions have led many business owners to rethink the concept. Here are four tips to get you started if you plan on setting up a fully remote business.
1. Have a Clear Onboarding Strategy
Identifying the best tools and software solutions for your remote business is one thing, and ensuring they’re familiar with these arrangements is another. Quite often, many businesses overlook the latter, assuming all workers must be tech champions. While this is rarely true, even though most workers know a thing or two, it’s always good to point them in the direction you want through effective onboarding.
At this phase, you can assess multiple people and identify their strengths and weaknesses regarding your established business processes and tech stack. From your insights, you can identify how best to deploy their skills. You can block some few days or weeks for intensive training for early-career personnel, ensuring they set off on the right foot.
Networking and collaboration can be tricky when working remotely. The best way to maintain good communication is with one-to-one meet and greets. The more workers know about each other, the more comfortable it can become to collaborate and achieve goals together.
2. Create an Enabling Remote-Working Environment
Creating an enabling environment is not only the responsibility of on-site business managers. For instance, you may be shooting yourself in the foot if you have no idea about the laptops your employees use to get work done. If their laptops are slow, they may give multiple excuses rather than submitting results, which doesn’t guarantee your remote business growth. It pays to check platforms like Lenovo.com for smart devices, phones, storage servers, and other key accessories to support remote working.
3. Assign Clear Roles
As a remote business manager, you’re setting your organization up for inefficiency if you’re not assigning clear tasks to employees. About 53 percent of remote workers find it difficult to draw the line between work and non-work life. Remote working can also tempt workers to sacrifice after-work hours and sometimes weekends.
Unfortunately, not all these hours are focused directly on executing tasks. Remote workers with unclear tasks may have to spend longer periods seeking clarity from managers, correcting mistakes in work dockets and other low-impact tasks even before the real work begins.
4. Report Progress
Make daily standups a top priority if you’re going fully remote as a business. It improves operational transparency, and its employees develop trustworthy relationships, which are vital for growth.
There’s no debate that remote working is the future of work. However, it’s crucial to learn from experiences expressed by current remote workers as we build more resilient remote working opportunities for employees.
