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Last Updated on January 20, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas
In today’s business landscape, remote workers make up a rapidly growing percentage of the total workforce. According to a 2012 report released by the U.S. Census Bureau, “In 2010, 4.2 million more people worked at home than a decade before.” In 2010 roughly 13.4 million people, or 9.5 percent of workers, worked from home at least one day per week. According to the American Community Survey, of those, 5.8 million Americans, or 4.3 percent of the U.S. workforce, worked the majority of the week at home in 2010.
“As communication and information technologies advance, we are seeing that workers are increasingly able to perform work at home,” said Peter Mateyka, an analyst in the Census Bureau’s Journey-to-Work and Migration Statistics Branch and one of the authors of the report.
With the percentage of people telecommuting growing each year, it’s important for freelancers and home-based business owners to understand how to effectively navigate remote teams. Understanding the unique challenges that accompany online work – and taking the needed steps to overcome them – is the key to freelancing success.
Challenges of a Remote Team
Effective collaboration and teamwork can be challenging even when everyone lives in the same area and works in the same building. It gets even harder when team members or clients who may have never met in person need to work together towards a common goal. Whether you’re prototyping an app, or collaborating on a grant proposal, you’re sure to run into some, if not all of these common problems:
Quality Staffing
If you’ve ever hired the wrong worker for the job you understand how quickly one wrong personality can sink a project. It can also be hard to maintain basic quality standards with remote workers. Not everyone on the team may have the same high standards when it comes to their work.
A few ways to overcome these issues are to ensure you hire the right person and give them ample time and opportunity to ask additional clarifying questions.
When hiring, spell out the exact skills and experiences you’re looking for, this will help you find the perfect candidate. Instead of looking for a graphic designer (a blanket job title that fits many types of workers) look for a product packaging designer with AutoCAD experience.
Ensuring that your team doesn’t drag you under may also mean setting due dates early so that projects can be reassigned and edited if needed. Over time, as you get better at pinpointing the type of team members you need and clarifying standards, this problem will likely disappear. You’ll eventually weed out unreliable workers who consistently deliver poor quality products or inappropriate results.
Communication
Sometimes cultural differences and vastly different time zones can add to existing communication problems. Personality differences always play a role in any team environment, but when you add workers who speak different languages, and with unusual working hours, it can be hard to communicate with some workers in the more traditional ways.
Phone meetings, brainstorming sessions, and other video conference meetings, can’t be as spontaneous and need to be planned far in advance to ensure everyone, or most everyone, on the team can attend. Utilize websites like EveryTimeZone, and add multiple time zones into your Google Calendar to ensure that you never miss a meeting. Consider using communication tools like Skype or GoToMeeting.
To keep any work discussions private, ensure that if you choose to use the free versions of tools like Trello, Google Drive, or Google Docs that your information is kept secure by limiting document access to only the members of your team. Also, take advantage of online collaboration tools like Basecamp and Asana – both allow for communication within the programs themselves.
Another great way to overcome any language or culture challenges is to become a proactive communicator. This means taking initiative to clarify assignments and offer help and guidance. Reach out to other team members on a regular basis to give and receive feedback. Understand how each person contributes to the team and have a clear vision of the goals and objectives of each person in the project. This will help you communicate well with one another and get the job done right the first time.
Project Scope
When collaborating on a project remotely, be sure that everyone knows what needs to be done next and by whom. Misunderstandings can cost time and money if not swiftly corrected. When working with team members, clients, and other freelancers, ensure that you use written and signed project scope contracts and agreements and ask everyone to sign them.
This also means defining responsibilities early on in the collaborative process. This will avoid having multiple team members working on the same tasks while others are left unaddressed.
If you don’t have one already, create or modify a standards guide. It doesn’t matter if your team includes coders, designers, writers, or other professionals – a basic standards guide will get everyone up to speed and on the same page. Provide clear examples or adopt other professional guidelines such as the APA (American Psychological Association) style guide for writing projects, and the Web Standards when designing websites.
Finances
For client, collaborations, and teams with international participants, currency and exchange rates can cause serious confusions. Be sure to specify financial details like which currency each member will be paid in while also outlining the payment method, project timeline, and work agreement right from the beginning. This will help you avoid problems and misunderstandings on money matters later on.
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re managing a remote client or team – or just working with one – learn everything you can about best practices when it comes to working together to accomplish common goals. Management training programs like Mind Tools, and articles like Managing Multicultural Teams, from Harvard Business Review, offer additional tips for working with geographically and culturally diverse teams.
