In the current business environment, a rising number of employees are working outside of the office. Whether this extends to staff members who may have to travel on a regular basis, or those that just prefer their home office to their cubicle, this trend is poised to grow in the future. To reap the advantages that a remote workforce can offer, administrators need to provide the right tools to ensure out-of-office workers’ success. However, they must also consider the business’ needs and create a remote staff that is productive and effective. Here are some tips for building a successful remote workforce.
1) Establish expectations first
Before allowing individuals to work outside of the company’s brick-and-mortar location, managers must clearly communicate the terms of this agreement and what they are expecting. SAP blog contributor Susan Galer suggested creating remote work policies based on each individual role at the company. These will lay out what each employee is responsible for and what happens if they fail to meet these requirements.
2) Leverage the cloud
A main factor that can make or break the success of a remote workforce is whether or not they have adequate resources on hand to perform their duties. By leveraging the cloud to store business applications and content, administrators can make these assets available to employees no matter the location from which they work. Additionally, supervisors can suggest that staff members work from a site that has effective bandwidth to ensure cloud performance and the functionality of Web applications.
3) Measure productivity
Savor the Success contributor Charlotte Walker pointed out that managers need to ensure that they aren’t paying individuals to waste time and resources at home. To achieve this, supervisors need to measure each off-premise employee’s productivity to check that they are just as productive out of the office as they are working at their desk.
4) Provide in-office resources as well
While some individuals may prefer to work outside the office, this does not mean that they will never come to the company’s physical location. Administrators should be sure that the office and its network infrastructure has enough resources to support the daily on-premise workforce, as well as any employees that work remotely, but come to the office from time to time. These efforts may include increasing bandwidth to ensure that there are adequate resources for remote and in-office employees’ workstations and mobile devices. Additionally, the business may want to consider adding a WAN failover solution to improve service uptime. Walker noted that embracing technology can help foster the success of mobile workforce initiatives, and this is true both inside and outside the office.