The Challenges of Managing a Remote Workforce

Working with virtual teams must be the best thing that happened to the world of business. It saves time, enables businesses to tap into a pool of global talents at affordable rates, increases productivity, and most importantly, saves money in terms of overhead costs. Those are just a few of the benefits of having a virtual team in your business. Perhaps that explains why virtual employees are almost hitting 70 percent of the entire workforce in the US.

But is this new trend entirely a bed of roses for employees and employers? Regrettably, it is not. Here are five unique challenges that are plaguing virtual working relationships.

1. Time Differences

Different Americans operate under slightly different time zones so an employer must find ways to harmonize all the time zones if he/she needs to effectively manage his/her remote workforce. But that’s not too much of a challenge in this case... Today, many American companies are outsourcing personnel from India, China, and other Eastern Asia countries. Now that’s a humongous challenge.

Considering how geographically different America and Asia are in terms of time zones, scheduling work and meetings is an enormous challenge for both the employer and the employee. Employees are sometimes forced to work at odd hours in order to align with American time. As an employer, however, the challenge is bigger because you could be having employees from multiple time zones, all of which you need to coordinate for them to work as a team.

But this unique challenge can easily morph into an advantage if you handle it well. You can cleverly come up with a schedule that favors all your employees’ time zones and then only partner individuals who come from the same time zones. That way, you can have all systems running for a whole 24 hours. As for the meeting time, the only solution would be to alternate between time zones. If today’s meeting was at noon American time, let the next one be at noon East Asian time.

2. Supervision Challenges

Every serious employer wants to manage his/her employees in order to ensure that they are efficient, professional, and meeting all the brand standards. Some remote employees will fail to meet deadlines and instead give convincing but false reasons. After all, you aren’t there to ascertain the legitimacy of those reasons. Others will do a shoddy job to the extent of requiring you to reassign their assignments to a more reputable team.

How can you counter this challenge? By engaging the services of a professional employer organization. Such an organization will handle all your HR-related jobs and ensure that your remote employees are always on their toes ready to deliver quality work and to beat all possible deadlines.

3. Recurring Misunderstandings

Virtual working relationships aren’t different from opening shops in different parts of the world. First, you will be dealing with people who probably don’t understand your language so well and neither do you understand theirs. Second, you will have to deal with cultural differences whereby some of your employees fail to understand basic, unwritten business rules. For example, it is an unwritten rule that bosses have a right to criticize non-performing employees in the Western culture but that doesn’t apply to the East. And lastly, you will have to deal with compensation challenges whereby some employees will feel that they deserve extra pay for doing a job that you thought didn’t warrant more pay.

4. Lack of Bonding Amongst Colleagues

One thing that promotes productivity in in-house teams is their ability to interact and bond. Unfortunately, remote teams may not have the chance to meet, talk, and get to know each other well. That lack of human interaction leads to misunderstanding, mistrust, and lack of cohesion. As a remote manager, therefore, you may need to organize retreats and team building exercises for your teams. This can be difficult and expensive because these are people who come from different countries and who speak different languages.

5. Misjudging of Character

As the employer, you sometimes are presented with the challenge of picking team leaders among a pool of employees. For example, you could be having a given project that requires a special team and a special skill set. If you had an in-house team, it would be easy to pick a group leader with the talent and ability to lead that special team. With a remote workforce, however, there is a big chance that you will misjudge your employees and choose a leader who isn’t a leader per se.