Every entrepreneur who bases its own business on a team of employees knows that working conditions have a significant impact on productivity. Among many improvements, it is the remote work with virtual team that becomes the standard which could bring entrepreneurs fairly large savings:
- Research conducted by MIT showed that dispersed groups are able to reach higher efficiency comparing to those teams who work in the same workplace.
- Research conducted by CISCO on a sample of 2000 people showed that 69% of employees reached higher efficiency when working remotely.
- According to Harvard Business Review, remote workers are much more involved in dealing with supervisors and co-workers, than workers staying in a common office.
- 82% of remote workers felt less stressed,
- 80% of remote workers felt more satisfied,
- 69% of workers have less work absenteeism.
The above results confirm the impact of such approach in improvement in workers mood and their efficiency (according to research productivity increased by 12%). In order to improve performance and achieve better results,you should pay attention to several elements of managing a virtual team.
Building a strong company culture
This is especially important in the case of a managment a remote team. Instead of giving commands give your employees a chance to show inititative and involve them in the project. New employed workers should be assigned to appropriate leaders-mentors, who will introduce them into ins and outs of company functioning and co-operation.
Communication
Should be based on actual system. Depending on the type of message you should use the right tools:
- communicators – instant messages, data updates, communication with whole team
- e-mail – longer messages between individual employees,
- wall team – long informations, statistics, reports
Suitable working tools
Should not be used newer and newer versions of communicators. Instead you should use the right tools for communication with the team and project development process integration.
Define expectations and be flexible
It is important to automatize processes which prevent problems arising when initiating new employees in their work. A good method is to bring on a guidebook defining the expectations from the team in order to avoid ambiguities which can affect the whole process. Specifying procedures, however, you need to be flexible and allow employees to participate in creation process which positively affects their motivation.
Meeting „face to face”
Besides a large number of video conferencing, a very important factor in building relations and team bonding are integration meetings which are held once or twice a year.
Addressing challenges in a virtual team
Also in this type of work there are challenges which, when properly used, can affect the higher performance of the entire team. Thanks to lack of a direct contacts, employees have to learn how to communicate through appropriate channels.
Virtual teams are becoming more and more popular. Creating this type of team allows to reduce costs from running the office at the same time to take advantage from the workers knowledge from around the world. Remote work mode reduces the risk of stress and increases motivation and efficiency in achieving business goals.
You must specify strategy so your remote team will work properly and more efficiently. If you want to find more about project system management – the topic is further described on this blog: https://devpark.pl/srodowisko-developerskie/
