Are you planning to hire a remote team? If yes, it is the time you should learn strategies to build a strong remote workforce. Remember, virtual hiring is not as easy as it sounds. Building a successful remote team without engaging in physical interaction requires careful planning.

From setting up foundations to managing the performance of the remote team, you have to take care of many things. Some key factors include specifying work policies, having a smooth onboarding process, effectively communicating with the team, etc. 

In this article, we will walk you through all the essential practices you need to do to develop a strong remote team. However, before delving into this debate, let’s first look at the benefits and challenges of building a remote team. So, ready to dive in? Let’s get started.

Key Takeaways

• The option to build a virtual team provides you with hiring flexibility, saves costs, and helps increase productivity. 
• Remote team building also often involves some challenges, including communication barriers and time zone differences. 
• To set a strong foundation for a virtual team, you need to set clear goals and effort to establish a cooperative work culture. 
• Effective communication plays an important role in the development of a result-focused remote team ready to achieve goals.
• Maintaining work efficiency in a company requires you to regularly monitor and improve the performance of team members.  
• Identifying team disputes and mitigating them helps establish a remote team that communicates ideas and problems openly. 
• Staying familiar with the current and upcoming trends in the remote work field allows you to expand your virtual team effectively. 

Benefits of Building a Remote Team

Building an efficient team of virtual workers provides many benefits to the company. Among them, here are some of the most prominent ones:

Flexibility In Hiring

As a remote recruiter, you don’t have to be involved in one-on-one interviews with the candidates. Rather, you can evaluate the capabilities of people by conducting online meetings from anywhere in the world. Moreover, virtual hiring provides you with flexibility in finding talent from all over the world. 

Cost Savings

Having a remote workforce reduces the company’s overhead costs significantly. The presence of remote workers eliminates the need to invest in office space, furniture, and other things. This saves a lot of revenue for a business that can be used to cover other essential expenses. 

Increased Productivity 

The comfort of working from home makes employees more productive. They efficiently complete the tasks before arriving at deadlines. This increased work pace enhances the overall productivity of the company. This productive environment enables companies to handle multiple projects simultaneously.  

Challenges of Remote Teams

Along with many benefits, building a remote team also carries some challenges. Here are some problems that you might have to cope with while hiring a virtual workforce. 

Communication Barriers

One big challenge that creates hindrances to collaborating with remote teams is the communication barrier. Especially when you have people from different nationalities struggling to converse in a common language, engaging in effective communication becomes a big problem. 

Time Zone Differences

When hiring talent from all over the globe, time zone differences take place. It becomes challenging for you to conduct interviews at your convenience due to the different time zones. You may have to sacrifice your productive time to schedule online meetings with applicants. 

Team Cohesion And Culture Building

The company culture totally depends on the workers. In the case of a remote team spread across different geographical locations, it becomes challenging to build a common work culture. Moreover, you may see less bonding in the team due to a lack of sitting next to each other. 

Strategies For Building A Strong Remote Team

Do you know how to build a strong remote team? If not, then, as a freelance recruiter, you must be familiar with the effective practices that can help you build an energetic team. For this purpose, you can rely on the following proven strategies:

Setting Up The Foundation

The process of building a productive virtual team that includes global talent starts with setting up a strong foundation. Here are the basic steps that you need to take to support the rest of the of the process.

Define Your Remote Work Policy 

• Clear expectations and guidelines: Clearly define what you need from the virtual team. Also, provide them with proper work instructions. 

• Tools and technology requirements: Prepare a detailed document indicating to workers what tools and technologies they are required to use.

• Legal and compliance considerations: To avoid any potential data breaches or other violations, set clear regulations and ask virtual workers to comply with them. 

Establish Core Values and Culture

• Articulate the company’s mission and values: Openly communicate the values and mission of your company with the remote team and motivate them to embrace ethics. 

• Create a culture that supports remote work: Try to create an environment where every team member feels satisfied. The comfy work settings lead to increased productivity. 

• Inclusive practices and diversity initiatives: Acknowledge the individual contributions of every teammate and take diverse initiatives that help them feel valued.

Choosing The Right Tools And Technology 

• Communication platforms: Prefer to use communication platforms that make it easy for you to share files and conduct audio and video meetings. 

• Project management tools: Select the tools that help the remote team manage their tasks easily. Such tools offer diverse features that contribute to seamless project management. 

• Time tracking and productivity tools: These tools help you determine how much time the team members are spending at work, which helps in figuring out productivity. 

Recruiting and Onboarding Remote Employees

When it comes to hiring individuals from different locations, you have to take into account many things. Here are some important factors you must consider while recruiting and onboarding employees: 

Job Description And Hiring Process

• Creating a compelling job description: The more compelling you write the job description, the more perfect candidates you will get. Write attractive descriptions that highlight the benefits. 

• Interviewing strategies for remote positions: Once you receive a sufficient number of applications, schedule one-to-one interviews with the most competent candidates.

• Key traits and skills to look for in candidates: Before hiring, make sure candidates have strong communication, problem-solving skills, and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

Onboarding Process

• Pre-onboarding preparations: Before onboarding successful candidates, send them welcome emails along with job confirmation letters and demand the necessary documents. 

• Virtual orientation and training: To help new team members understand the company’s work culture, conduct virtual orientation meetings and comprehensive training.

• Set up mentorship or buddy systems: After hiring virtual workers, create their groups based on work similarities and assign an experienced mentor to each group.   

Legal And Compliance Considerations

• Employment laws and regulations: Familiarize the virtual team with your company’s work regulations and encourage them to practice the advised ethics during work. 

• Data protection and cybersecurity policies: To protect your company’s data from theft, create strict policies and have a written agreement with employees regarding data security. 

Communication Strategies For Remote Teams

Communication lies at the core of collaboration with remote teams. Effective conversations within virtual workplaces contribute to the efficient completion of tasks. You need to keep the following things in mind regarding communication:

Synchronous Vs Asynchronous Communication

• Benefits and challenges of each method: Balancing synchronous and asynchronous communication is essential for remote work. For this purpose, you need to have a clear understanding of the benefits and challenges of both methods. 

• Use tools and best practices for effective communication: To ensure every message is delivered properly, use efficient tools and engage in different types of communication. 

Effective Meeting Management 

• Scheduling and conducting virtual meetings: Remember, on-time meetings can prevent misunderstandings in workflow. So, make sure you conduct the needed meetings timely. 

• Using video conferencing tools effectively: Use a quality webcam and a feature-rich video calling tool to have a strong visual interaction with the remote team. 

• Best practices for team check-ins and updates: Arrange weekly or monthly meetings to have a check-in with team members regarding the growth of ongoing projects. 

Building A Communication Culture

• Encouraging open and transparent communication: Encourage every remote team member to openly share their thoughts on any project issue or progress.

• Regular feedback loops and performance reviews: Frequently conduct feedback sessions and let the team speak about what changes they need and how projects are going. 

Managing Remote Team Performance

After you hire an energetic remote team, the next phase is managing the team with high proficiency. You can rely on the following practices to successfully manage a large team of virtual workers:

Setting Clear Goals And Expectations

• Establishing smart goals: Before evaluating the performance of any team member, first decide what you want from them. Keep your exceptions relevant, measurable, and achievable. 

• Regular goal tracking and performance metrics: Have a regular check on the performance of the team through essential metrics and figure out whether they are meeting your goals or not. 

Monitoring And Evaluating Performance

• Tools for tracking productivity and output: Use powerful performance monitoring tools like Time Doctor, Clickup, or Trello. These tools also allow you to check progress in real time. 

• Handling underperformance and providing support: If you find any team member performing below average, sort out the problem and provide help to increase their productivity. 

Providing Recognition And Rewards

• Virtual rewards and recognition systems: To keep the team’s motivation high, host virtual reward ceremonies and appreciate the top-performing members.

• Celebrating achievements and milestones: Divide the large projects into small and achievable milestones and celebrate when each task gets completed on time.  

Building And Maintaining Team Cohesion

A virtual team contributes to the growth of a company when there is a strong internal bond. The uncooperative behavior of team members can ruin the company’s success. Well, you can build and maintain healthy team relationships by acting on the below practices. 

Virtual Team Building Activities

• Ice-breakers and games: The game can build strong bonds between teammates. You can arrange virtual game competitions to create a cooperative work environment. 

• Virtual team retreats and social events: You can celebrate social events by having a virtual get-to-gather. Also, you can host online fun challenges for the team’s entertainment. 

Creating A Sense Of Belonging

• Inclusion and engagement strategies: Create groups of employees with similar tasks and ask them to engage in effective conversations with each other. 

• Encouraging participation and collaboration: When a team member gives any suggestions, appreciate their participation in the discussion and encourage them for further collaboration. 

Conflict Resolution In Remote Teams

• Addressing conflicts and misunderstandings: Identify and address the misunderstandings between virtual workers and advise them to behave like friends with each other. 

• Strategies for mediating disputes: Foster a culture of respecting the perspective of every team member and providing safe workspace to everyone. It helps reduce team disputes. 

Using Productivity Tools for Team Efficiency

The use of the right digital tools could prove highly beneficial for boosting the efficiency of virtual teams. These tools not only enhance productivity but also work quality. You can empower your team with the following tools to help them streamline their workflow:

Onethread For Project Management

• Task management: Onethread allows you to plan your large tasks and break them into easily trackable and achievable subtasks. Also, it lets you assign a specific task to any team member. 

• Custom workflow creation: This amazing tool allows virtual recruiters to create a custom workflow that better suits the needs of their projects and team. 

• Data visualization charts: Its “Gantt Chart” feature helps the team members visually track the performance of their work on particular projects in already set periods.

Agency Handy For Client Management

• Structure deliverables: Being a useful client management tool, Agency Handy permits keeping a safe and organized record of the client’s requirements and other project details.

• Invoice generation: After completing a particular project, you can generate accurate invoices using this tool and send them to respective clients. 

• Central dashboard: This tool provides you with a central dashboard that provides you insights on the latest orders, conversations, and generated revenue. 

Apploye For Time Tracking

• Real-Time tracking: Apploye is an amazing detective tool that allows you to keep a firm eye on the activities of your team within working hours. 

• Advanced reporting: To help you know the productivity of every team member, it provides useful data like screenshots of desktop activities and details of URLs opened.  

• Time tracking on projects: Team members can use this tool to measure how much time they take to complete a particular project. It helps them measure their work efficiency. 

Online Summarizer For Quick Documentation Readings

• Extraction of essential details: Virtual workers can use an efficient text summarizer to extract essential details from a lengthy document. This helps quickly grasp the intended message. 

• Summarization of lengthy project details: An online summarizing tool can aid remote workers in condensing project-related details so that they can easily understand the requirements and processes. 

• Customization of document’s length: A feature-rich summarizer provides users with the ability to set a specific length of input document that they feel is sufficient for reading. 

Scaling And Evolving Your Remote Team

You often need to scale your remote team to fill the skill gaps within your existing team and handle the increasing workload. To evolve in virtual work, you have to take care of certain things. Here are some key factors to keep in mind: 

Expanding The Team 

• Strategies for scaling up remote operations: Work on strategies that can help you expand your reach over virtual projects. For this purpose, you might consider building an effective market network and exploring new freelance marketplaces. 

• Maintaining culture and cohesion with growth: Well, as your team grows, don’t overlook maintaining healthy relationships with existing and new members and building team cohesion.  

Adapting To Change

• Handling transitions and restructuring: Keep your company and team ahead of the curve by timely adapting to new advancements in technologies and emerging trends.

• Continuous improvement and feedback integration: To keep growing at a fast pace, consider improving team management systems, especially by catering to the team’s suggestions. 

Future Trends in Remote Work

• Technological advancements: In the coming days, it is more likely that sophisticated work automation tools powered by AI will be available to reduce the workload of remote workers. 

• Remote work global trends: Stay informed about technological advancements, remote work policies, and global trends regarding remote work, and adapt your strategies and practices accordingly.

To Sum Up 

To put it concisely, building a remote team becomes easy when you have a proper plan for hiring, training, managing, and scaling. After going through the above article, we hope that you have completely understood all these points. If you have reviewed every strategy thoroughly, we believe that you are now ready to develop a strong team of virtual workers.