Remote Workforce Management: 5 Tips to Improve It

Remote workforce management: There’s no doubt that remote work has become the new normal. Businesses have come to realize how adopting a remote work strategy enables employees to become more attuned to their job, less susceptible to stress/burnout and—importantly—less at risk to highly infectious diseases or natural calamities. This leads to greater productivity, higher talent retention rates and lower costs due to reduced expense on office space, electricity and office furniture/fixtures.

Still, not all remote work initiatives flourish. There are those that, due to poor planning and execution, sadly fall by the wayside. As a leader, you need to apply good remote workforce management for those initiatives to succeed. Here are five tips that can help you in that regard.

1. Treat remote employees as local

One of the most common mistakes managers make when dealing with their remote workforce is giving them less attention than those who are working on site. A lack of communication and engagement with remote workers—especially compared to onsite workers—can make them feel alienated. When workers feel they’re not completely part of the team, they might not give projects the level of focus and dedication they deserve. Fortunately, there are now several technological advancements you can leverage to engage remote workers as if you were all in the same location. Video conferencing software, file sharing solutions, remote workforce management tools, remote applications, and online collaboration tools are just some of the many solutions you can employ for this purpose.

2. Use video conferencing when possible

Email, text, and instant messaging apps can help a lot in maintaining an open line with remote workers. But they’re not
enough. In order to add a more personal touch, make a point to communicate through video conferencing as well. Talking to
employees face to face (even virtually) will prevent them from feeling isolated. It also puts yourself in a better position to
read visual cues and reduce miscommunication issues.

3. Add multiple people to calls

When doing video conferences, don’t limit yourself to one-on-one engagements. While several situations do call for one-on-one sessions, it’s important to instill teamwork and foster camaraderie. That can only be achieved if you set up the
environment for it.

A multi-person conference encourages employees to interact with one another and ensure no one’s left out of important discussions. Whenever possible, try to inject a relaxed atmosphere that mimics water cooler interactions during office breaks to help everyone open up and establish rapport with colleagues.

4. Provide access to tools they need

More often than not, your remote workforce will need access to the same tools they use while onsite. That includes peripherals, especially printers. Telecommuters will want those tools to enable them to work quickly and efficiently. That means they won’t like applications that lag or crash every now and then. For your part, make sure the remote workforce client you employ can provide remote workers with the speed and stability they need.

5. Monitor the workload of your employees

Not everyone who ventures into remote work finds it less stressful. On the contrary, some end up getting overloaded. These are the people who either receive a deluge of assignments from bosses who somehow treat remote workers as if they’re available 24/7 or simply find it hard to unplug themselves.

Because you don’t want your remote workers suffering burnouts, you need to find ways to monitor their workload. Remote workforce monitoring has huge benefits for both employees and employers. When employees know that the time they are spending productively is getting tracked, they are more likely to be accountable for their output. As such, they are more likely to get motivated to work productively.

Remote staff monitoring can also build trust in the organization. Employers can know that the work they are paying for will get completed as efficiently as possible and on time. As such, they can rest assured about the prospects of their return on investments(ROIs). Below are a few tools you can use to monitor the workload of your employees:

Trello. Trello is a Trello Kanban-style and web-based project management software you can use to track tasks and projects by organizing to-do lists, projects, and conversations.
Asana. Like Trello, Asana can help you organize to-do lists, projects, and conversations when managing tasks and projects.

Hubstaff. Hubstaff is a remote application that you can use to track the time and activities of employees.
SentryPC. You can use SentryPC for various uses, including tracking employees’ activity and blocking websites that don’t enhance productivity, among others.

How Parallels RAS improves your remote workforce management

One major challenge of adopting a remote work strategy is dealing with a smorgasbord of devices. Unless you force all your workers to use the same laptop, phone, tablet, or desktop (which is virtually impossible), you will likely have to deal with an assortment of Windows, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Android, Chrome OS and perhaps even Linux devices. Because these are entirely different platforms, it can be difficult to deploy your (most likely Windows-based) work applications on every one of them.

But there’s a way to address this problem: you can use Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) to deliver remote applications. Parallels RAS offers an easy way to deploy applications in a central location—like an on-premises datacenter, the public cloud, or a hyper-converged infrastructure—and then deliver those applications remotely to any endpoint device regardless of the operating system.

Not only that, but it also provides an environment that enables centralized deployment, security, and monitoring of those applications. With Parallels RAS, remote workers will be able to use remote applications as if they are native or locally installed to their device of choice.

We hope you found this list of remote workforce management tips useful and invite you to download a 30-day evaluation of Parallels RAS. It will introduce you to a powerful but easy way of improving your remote workforce management initiatives.

References:

Remote workforce management: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/05/30/top-15-tips-to-effectively-manage-remote-employees/#36f2f7e7503c

Remote workforce management: https://buffer.com/state-of-remote-work-2019