Last updated on June 8, 2022
The Importance of Having Secure Remote Management for your Business
To say that 2020 was a challenging year would be an understatement. The events that unfolded had a severe impact on all aspects of our lives, both personal and business-wise – forcing businesses to quickly adapt to remote management.
It can be said that 2020 forced digitalization within many companies to the next level. There is one area that is always a priority during digitalization and also a critical element of any business—people.
McKinsey estimates that the number of people working from home will increase by 300–500% compared to the numbers working at home before the pandemic began.
What is Remote Management?
Remote working is when people can work from home or from any other location, and they are not required to come to the company’s office. “Working from home” is another term for this.
If you work for a firm that allows its workers to work from home, you’ll have to be able to manage your staff remotely as well. The term “remote management” refers to leading a team that works remotely. Tracking your team’s progress on tasks, creating tasks for each team member, resolving any difficulties your team members have, and addressing team members’ questions are all part of remote management.
Remote Management Benefits
It is highly probable that in 2020 you had a chance to try working remotely, so you can see the opportunities and challenges that may come with it. Let’s start with the opportunities that remote work can bring to your company.
Bigger Talent Pool
Remote work is blurring borders and cultures. When your company is ready to offer a remote workplace, it does not matter if your future employees are located in your city, country or even continent.
Your potential talent pool suddenly increases. You are no longer limited to the candidates in your vicinity, but you can hire globally. That way you can leverage differences in average salaries while still getting the same level of work quality.
Remote access allows you to provide the tools and the right technological environment, so your employees can be located anywhere and work from any time zone.
Increased Team Productivity
Some studies claim that the worker is productive for a maximum of three hours while in the office. The remaining time is spent chatting, browsing and doing other tasks that are not related to the work itself.
Open space offices do not help at all. Actually, they decrease productivity and make interactions less efficient.
In the case of many employees, remote work is a great advantage. They save time by not commuting and usually have a calm corner or room where they can concentrate without hearing phone calls and conversations from tens of desks around them.
Employees who have families learn to create boundaries for their close ones so they can still deliver their tasks on time, in the best possible quality.
Higher Retention Rates
Increased productivity is a direct result of employees being more satisfied with the structure of their day. That satisfaction has an additional effect—higher retention rates.
Hiring new employees is always a challenge. You do not know their real value until they work on your team; you can not predict how they fit in with other team members. Most importantly, you must spend time and other resources on them before they are fully established members of the company.
When an employee decides to leave, the damage is significant. It is estimated that for a midsized company with 150 employees and an employee turnover rate of about 10%, the yearly cost for onboarding and training can climb to $1.5 million.
Remote work helps you to mitigate that. Increased work-life balance will ensure that employees are less inclined to look for another job. This will result in a more mature and experienced workforce who can work together like a well-run machine.
Costs Savings
One of the most important aspects is, of course, cost savings. There are some obvious examples, like office space. Since a big part of your workforce is working remotely, you do not need to have one seat for each employee.
If you have water, coffee or snacks that you serve in the office, the savings on these will amount to a good sum in one year.
The whole separate savings category of time is related tightly to remote access capabilities. How often do your teams meet when they are in the office? Let’s assume that they meet twice a week for one hour. The total attendee count is five.
Even if the meeting takes exactly one hour, you have to add an hour that will be wasted on planning, preparation, and winding down just due to the lack of focus before and after a meeting. So, we are at two hours.
If we expand on these very basic assumptions, it would mean that in one week, the total number of working hours spent on those meetings is 20 hours. For one month it is 40 hours. For one year it is 180 hours.
Think about spending 180 hours on team meetings, where half of that time is just planning, preparing, and losing concentration. If we project an average $28 hourly salary of an office manager, we are at $5,040 a year for just these small team meetings, where at least $2,520 is just wasted time.
And that is even before we start discussing if all five workers are really needed in that meeting and if that meeting could not have just been an email or two.
This is another example where remote work accompanied by the proper use of remote tools could help.
Remote Management Challenges
In the previous section, we discussed the potential advantages of remote management and remote work. In this part, we look at some of the challenges.
Change of Management Style
When the team has switched to remote work, the management style has to change, and not every manager is ready to take charge of a remote team.
While it is hard to maintain team morale and work ethics when you see your team members every day, it is even more difficult when you have to do that remotely.
Communication methods and frequency become critical. Managers that switch to remote roles have to adapt to new ways of keeping up to date with their team members. Creating a clear communication policy for the whole team can help.
In comparison to much less efficient in-person meetings, remote communication tools are simple to use and ensure that everyone is ready to attend the call when the time comes.
Lack of Corporate Culture
It is challenging to instill corporate culture into employees that are not in the office. But at the same time, corporate culture and corporate values are very important. How to solve this?
A weekend retreat or a whole-team meeting at headquarters or elsewhere are options to consider, but as 2020 showed, they are not always viable. Yet again, the proper use of remote work tools is the main solution.
On each team call and each email, the manager should be an ambassador of the values and corporate culture that your company stands for. Outgoing email style, reaction speed, work ethic—that all can be demonstrated to your team even if you are working remotely.
Tracking Team Productivity
You can not improve what you can not measure. When managers are in the office, apart from obvious criteria like deadlines and completed tasks, a quick glance over the desk allows them to know the workflow and productivity level of their team.
That is quite challenging when you are in remote management mode. But does it mean that you have to just rely on your team members’ full honesty? Not really. Of course, a high level of trust is always good, but when you are a remote manager, you have to be on top of things all of the time.
This issue can be mitigated by having clear, quantifiable key performance indicators (KPIs) in place. You need parameters that can be measured objectively and not be subjected to personal opinions. For example, your KPIs could include the number of:
- Calls made.
- Presentations completed.
- Queries solved.
- Deals closed.
Another part of the solution is proper project management tools. Nowadays you have a wide choice of platforms that can help you keep track of what your teammates are doing. They range from basic time tracking to more sophisticated solutions that allow everyone to mark their contribution on a particular project.
Low Face-to-Face Interaction Time
People are social beings, so it is no surprise that building personal relationships in the workplace is important.
We spend the majority of our waking hours working with our colleagues. With all of this time spent together, facing failures and successes, we build strong personal relationships. Creating these semi-friendly relationships improves teamwork and individual morale.
Asking for help or helping others becomes easier, and in some cases, strong personal bonds may prevent a great professional from leaving the team, which is immensely valuable.
Sometimes when you are working remotely, you may feel left out or out of touch with your team and your headquarters. Harvard Business Review reports that out of 1,100 remote workers, over 50% feel that they are treated differently by their teammates now that they are not physically in the office. They do not have the same level of detailed contact as to when they were in the office, and this “remote bubble” is putting them at a disadvantage.
2020 leveled the playing field a bit while everyone was working remotely. It can be expected that in the following year many will return to the office, but still, in the years to come, more and more people will be working remotely.
Again, communication and project management tools come to save the day. Scheduling a one-on-one call can help make someone feel included. Sometimes keeping the whole team in the loop is easier remotely when you have fast online chats instead of cumbersome emails.
There is no need to gather everyone or check calendars. You can distribute the same information to all participants. If somebody is not able to attend a meeting, record it, and let them watch it later. If you do want to share information with your team through email, use one of the newsletter templates to make sure that everybody notices.
For newcomers that did not have a chance to take part in earlier group activities and have many things to learn, you can create an online course that they can complete at their own pace.
There are many ways to keep your whole team included and up to date so nobody feels left out.
The Best Practices for Remote Management
Working with the Right Tools
Perhaps the most critical step is to select the appropriate instruments for the job. Conferences, scrums, webinars, and everyday duties are all covered. Depending on the requirements, each work necessitates the use of different instruments. To come up with the greatest tool set possible, have a conversation with your team.
Tasks Given must be Clear and Well Defined
You should make sure the duties you provide your staff aren’t vague or open-ended. Ensure that the duties are clear and concise. This will assist the team in setting appropriate goals and reducing the risk of getting off course.
Trust your Employees
Some managers get unduly concerned or nervous about their employees as a result of human psychology, and these sentiments may be amplified while workers are absent from the workplace. Micromanaging or scrutinizing every aspect, on the other hand, is likely to engender animosity among direct subordinates.
The great majority of staff are brilliant people looking for a career that will challenge them and allow them to contribute. A successful leader will focus on those aspirations rather than obsessing over every tiny detail.
Encourage Flexible Working
Working from home is enjoyable since it allows you to stay in your familiar surroundings. Comfort leads to a positive mood, which leads to productive and efficient production when working. So don’t deprive your team of it. Allow them to take breaks while working, but don’t expect them to stay on video calls all day or to check in on them regularly.
Feedback
In order to establish a good work environment, employees should feel comfortable receiving criticism from their leaders. In order to create such an environment, a good manager has to learn to both provide and receive feedback from their employees.
Remote Management Deciphered
In the sections above, we discussed some of the main challenges that arise from remote work, and you may have noticed a common denominator. It is something you need both to leverage opportunities and solve main remote management challenges—proper tools.
It all comes down to the accessibility of software and other applications that your team will be using. With every issue, with every non-functioning platform, you are losing productivity, wasting time, and getting your team members frustrated.
The alpha and omega of successful remote management are applications and files that are available instantly to everyone.
Achieving that is no easy task. All the resources that your team needs must be deployed quickly, must have working versions, mustn’t be blocked by other internal tools, etc.
But not only that, you need your virtual desktops and applications to work on tablets, PCs, notebooks, and smartphones; let’s not even get started on operating systems. As you can see, there are plenty of possibilities that are difficult to juggle all at once.
That can be solved with the use of Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS).
Parallels RAS is a Remote Management and Working Solution
Parallels RAS provides you with seamless access to virtual desktops and applications. Virtual workloads can be accessed from anywhere with any device. Considering the points that we covered in the previous sections, you can already see the implications of remote management.
Collaboration Is Easier
All your team members have access to the resources, tools, and platforms that they would use in a traditional office scenario. This makes collaboration incredibly easy. Even if they access their virtual desktop from a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone, the same applications are at their disposal.
This way the communication inside the organization is standardized, even with newcomers, as everybody has access to their applications, desktops and collaboration tools from day one.
IT Troubleshooting Is Effortless
Let’s investigate a common scenario. You have a team meeting or a client pitch coming up, and one of your team members sends you a message that a particular application is not working.
That is a disaster if you are using a decentralized IT solution, but it’s just a small bump on the road when you are using Parallels RAS.
A colleague from IT (who can be located anywhere across the globe) can just access the server, see what the issue is, fix it, and that is it. Your colleague can connect and work without losing precious time. IT can deploy new users, applications, security patches, and upgrades from anywhere.
You Can Scale as You Go
With Parallels RAS auto-scaling capabilities, meeting user demands according to traffic requirements is straightforward. Auto-scale your IT infrastructure by automatically generating and deploying virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) desktops on the fly with customized templates, saving time and resources.
Parallels RAS supports on-premises, hybrid, and public cloud deployments.
Your Data Is Protected
Not all your team members will be good with technology, and mistakes can happen. Costly mistakes.
If you allow your employees to install and service applications themselves, you might be exposed to unexpected security breaches. Or they might unknowingly connect through an unsecured line, potentially exposing sensitive data.
Parallels RAS reinforces data protection with high encryption, multi-factor authentication, smart cards, advanced filtering and customized policies. The possibility of any kind of data leak or security breach is therefore minimalized.
Summary
Remote management is impossible to imagine without proper project management and communication tools that are distributed to the whole team.
All the things that we were used to when working face to face have to be switched to a digital alternative. In the vast majority of cases, the quality of work is not diminished. On the contrary! When working remotely, employees (and companies) in general:
- Are more focused.
- Have a better work/life balance.
- An increase in employee retention.
- Can cut many costs.
This comes with several challenges that remote managers need to face:
- New management styles.
- Difficulty embodying corporate culture.
- Issues with tracking productivity.
- Substituting personal interaction.
Many of us had a chance to experience firsthand that most of these challenges arise from insufficient technological support. In many cases, companies were not ready for such a quick move into the digitalized world.
This is why Parallels RAS can be one of the main supporting pillars for remote management. It allows you to distribute all the applications your team needs seamlessly, so you can withstand any event that the future may throw at you.
About the Author
Vlad Falin is the founder of and blogger at Cost of Income, where he writes to thousands of monthly readers about digital business tools and ways to grow their online businesses.
