How to Transition a Team from On-Site to Remote Work

Working remotely is the “it” way to work. Business magazines run profiles on sexy tech startups that grow their businesses and profits, all while working from home. Today, there are even job boards that help you find remote jobs or in a more flexible capacity than traditional on-site employment.

And it’s not all pie in the sky dreaming. Remote working really can lead to happier workers. A study by Polycom found that two-thirds of employees said their favorite co-workers were located elsewhere. It seems that when it comes to work, too much familiarity breeds contempt.

That’s understandable. It’s easier to like someone when they’re not breathing down your neck all day, day after day.

So if you’d like to transition into a freer work eco-system that rewards results instead of time wasted in the office fiddling with the coffee machine, below are the keys to success you’ll need for a stellar remote work team.

Organization will be key

Organization is always key, but it takes on a special level of importance when you’re working remotely. Because of being more spread out, employees will need easier access to the files and information they need when they need them.

If you work remotely, cloud-based storage will become a tool that you’ll wonder how you ever lived without. Just a few of the most popular online collaboration tools include DropBox, Google Docs, Sharepoint and Jive.

You can also keep your invoicing and payments organized through Workspoke.

Have easy ways to communicate

Just because you’ll all work from home doesn’t mean you have to become shut-ins who only mumble to cats. Communication will actually be more important than ever, as well.

The current golden child for remote communications is Slack. It’s a messaging program that allows live-time chat, the ability to upload documents and even video call options. You can also organize certain communications into certain channels so people know where their conversations about certain projects and topics are.

But there are also other options like HipChat, Skype has internal instant messaging and there’s PukkaTeam, which allows instant video chats whenever someone needs them.

Keeping company culture alive

One major fear of going remote is that the organizational culture will suffer. It’s hard to forget the companies that end up ordering employees back to the office, like Yahoo did several years ago, in an effort to have a more “collaborative culture.”

But being in the same room doesn’t mean success, as also evidenced by Yahoo. What makes or breaks an organizational culture is how employees treat each other and their attitude towards their work. And there’s no reason that has to suffer just because you’re in different locations.

Just a few ideas for keeping corporate culture alive include:

• Orchestrate some form of a meeting so people can put a name to a face. This can be an annual holiday party, a quarterly meeting or even a monthly meeting.
• Have regular video conferencing meetings over tools like Skype or over the phone so people can ask questions or go over plans in real time.
• One creative idea is to offer the sort of perks that you might see in a more traditional office environment. Have free lunches delivered to the employee, orchestrate a digital Secret Santa pool where employees can order and ship things to each other from Amazon or send gift cards around the holidays.

The issue of keeping people on task

The biggest concern you may have as a manager is keeping people on task. That can seem hard enough in the office when there’s Facebook and water cooler talk to be had.

But thanks to several key software programs, it’s easy to keep tabs on people. Look into time-tracking software like Toggl, Tick or Timesheets if your work is more hourly.

Though working remotely is also a good time to reassess how you keep your employees accountable. It may be time to reward your team for results rather than time put in, which will mean ditching the 9–5 mentality. You can achieve this by tracking employees based on project deadlines, which you can do through programs like Trello or Basecamp.

Focusing more on tasks completed and goals met goes hand-in-hand with working remotely. The whole point of working remotely is to get away from feeling like you’re just putting in the hours in the day. As long as employees are getting the actual work done up to standard and to deadline, it doesn’t matter when they work.

A good way to ease into such an accountability system is to set up mini-deadlines or goals for your employees to hit. You can easy track these in the programs mentioned above. That keeps your employees engaged over a sustained period of time, instead of rushing out substandard work last minute, which might be tempting after being let loose into the wild (AKA home or the coffeeshop).

How to coordinate client meetings

If you have client or shareholder meetings on a regular basis, those can make going remote feel downright impossible. But you can keep up these activities while still being remote much of the time.

You’ll simply need to keep a lease on an office for a meeting space. And an added perk is that you may not need as much office space as you had previously, reducing overhead costs to your business. And if you meet infrequently, consider renting temporary office space.

Mixing it up

With going remote, you don’t need to completely jump all in. Forcing employees to go remote if they really don’t want will only breed resentment. Besides, once the office employees see how well remote work goes, they may want to try remote work down the line.

So consider having employees only go remote if it’s something they want to do. That may mean a split team, with some people working in the office and some working from home, but that’s not a problem with today’s technology.

Simply make sure both the remote employees and the office workers are all working in the same time or project-tracking software. Keep communication open with video conferencing and chat programs. In essence, treat the office workers the same way you treat the remote workers in terms of productivity and time tracking to keep everyone on even footing.

You’ll need to hire differently

Whether you’re building a team from the ground up or hiring for an individual role on a remote team, you’ll need to refocus your hiring slightly. Consider looking for employees who are specifically looking for remote work options through job boards like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Virtual Vocations. You stand a good chance of finding people who are used to remote work in the first place.

You’ll also need to focus more than even on the soft skills the employee brings to the table. You’ll need someone who really knows how to stick to deadlines, is self-motivated enough to keep on task from home and has incredibly strong communication skills. All of these skills will mean a more successful remote employee who is easier to work with.

Security risks

Security issues can feel like a bigger threat when your team is spread out, with people working on separate computers and from different networks. Luckily, there are a few ways to keep things secure:

• Make sure your team is using secure passwords that are updated frequently.
• Use remote or wireless network access through VPN (Virtual Private Network), which more closely mirrors using a company network in terms of security features like encryption.
• Look into data encryption on individual employee devices and signed/encrypted emails (SSL/TLS).
• Consider providing company laptops set up with the latest security protocols.