The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted our working life. After the pandemic, many organizations started to change the way they work to prevent further spreading of the virus.
Before 2019, almost all organizations were committed to remote work, but now, it’s not the same story. Around 16% of organizations worldwide work fully remotely. However, still, 44% of companies don’t allow remote work, but this might change in the upcoming years.
That’s why it’s important to stay updated with current trends and to leverage your international workforce this year.
8 Ways to leverage remote work this year
1. Leverage your digital collaboration platforms
The success of your remote team significantly depends on your communicating and collaborating with your team. If you don’t invest in the proper digital collaboration tools, it’s quite challenging for your team to collaborate and maintain the required level of productivity.
Therefore, the best thing you can do is to provide users with a great user experience from the first day. Your online digital platforms should be easy to use and allow your team members to easily access them from all devices.
Digital collaboration tools are used for real-time communication, regardless if it’s done via text or video chat, so that there’s no lag when replying to emails and getting responses from team members in different time zones worldwide.
Social media channels are one of the most common digital collaborative platforms used by higher powers for communicating with consumers and understanding their needs and wants. Also, many remote teams are using Slack and other digital collaboration tools to communicate.
2. Define your goals
Establish clear goals that you want to achieve and ensure that your employees are focused and aligned with the company's values. For instance, if you set quarterly performance targets for your sales team, you can contribute to a much more engaged remote workforce because they’ll have a goal to achieve.
This also includes setting up a long-term plan to ensure that you’re achieving the organization’s vision and mission, as well as sharing regular updates to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Studies show that organizations that define goals are 43% more likely to achieve them. Therefore, it’s important to prioritize this part and to always consider setting goals before you start implementing any strategy.
3. Pay close attention to your employee well-being
Employee well-being is all part of the process for your business to succeed. Many employers don’t prioritize employee well-being as much as they should and when working remotely, this is a big mistake you can make.
Many people like to work remotely, but everything has a downside to it and some employees face them while working remotely.
55% of global employees are struggling with their well-being because of overloaded stress at the workplace or not. Remote work might impact employees in their social life because they’ll need to work from home and distance themselves from the everyday world.
Most new remote workers struggle to experience the fact that they’re at work. To tackle these types of issues, you need to equip employees with the mental health resources they need.
4. Hire the right people
You’d be surprised, but when it comes to remote work, you need to carefully choose who you hire. There are plenty of candidates who actually don’t want to work remotely, so it’s important to state this before hiring them. However, a solution for finding the right talent is to utilize a remote job board, such as Remotewokr. It enables employers to connect with individuals who are specifically seeking remote opportunities, ensuring a higher likelihood of finding motivated and suitable candidates.
If you don’t want to be involved in the complicated processes then the best alternative to go with when hiring people is to use a hiring platform. These platforms allow you to recruit some of the best talents around, hire and onboard people and even care for your team when you don’t have the time to do so.
To make things better, you can consider using a platform that focuses on hiring people internationally. For example, just like Global Expansion’s HR services, you can onboard team members from all over the world and have a team full of HR experts.
Global HR services cover numerous functions, from recruiting and hiring benefits to administration compliance and more.
5. Use AI applications
AI is becoming an increasing trend for remote work. It has lots of potential for improving collaboration, efficiency and productivity in the workplace.
Therefore, it’s always a good idea to incorporate AI applications into your remote work. Here are some ways to do so:
- Adaptability: As the increase of remote work becomes common, AI continues to evolve and evolve based on the needs and changes of businesses. Even nowadays, most of the work is performed by AI and this will become standard in the near future.
- Chatbots: Are becoming common and assist you in daily task management and answering all questions that need to be answered, reducing time consumption and allowing you to focus more on important tasks. Chatbots are important for enhancing the customer experience because they are active when you aren’t. Human beings can’t be active 24/7, but chatbots can.
- Project management software: AI-powered project management software can automate workflow processes and provide you with real-time updates on your progress and efficiency.
- Language translation: With AI-generated translations, you can collaborate with your clients and colleagues much easier without having to hire translators. This is a budget-friendly solution for all businesses that want to reduce their business expenses.
- Trust: AI can help build up trust levels between you and your remote teams. This is done by continuously monitoring performance and providing users with feedback on areas where improvements can be made. This not only promotes flexibility but allows you to schedule your working hours.
6. Invest in learning and personal development
Learning and personal development programs are an excellent way for ensuring that your team is compatible to work remotely. After all, working remotely requires contribution and without having the adequate skills to do so, career development is something in high demand.
Overall, learning and development programs are an excellent way for helping employees reach their full potential. Most employees pay great attention to developing their skills and if you personally don’t do so, you might lose talented employees and make potential candidates stay away from you.
Employees will always feel better staying at an organization that invests in them and this is even more important when you’re working remotely.
7. Maintain regular communication
Even though you’re working remotely, you need to maintain a regular balance in communication. There needs to be regular check-ins and feedback for maintaining a strong level of communication when working remotely. For instance, to maintain a high level of communication, you can do the following:
Also, perform regular communication through the type of digital collaboration tools you’re going to use.
8. Don’t forget about cybersecurity
You might be wondering why cyber security is becoming an important part of remote work. Since the online world is continuously evolving, it’s becoming more challenging to keep up with security standards as there are continuous online attacks.
More than 33 billion records were stolen in 2023 and this is a 175% increase from 2018. This means that cyber security is more important than you think and is required for you in order to effectively run an online business.
However, in this case, don’t forget about privacy regulations since you want to ensure that privacy is entirely protected during the process. As AI systems collect and analyze data, they’ll identify any potential threats that might be used or misused. Nevertheless, businesses need to take the essential steps and secure this data, ensuring that they comply with privacy regulations.
Most businesses will protect privacy by using differential privacy. This includes the randomization of datasets before having to analyze them, which allows you to protect each individual privacy while still giving room for effective analysis.
Remote work is the future
Working culture is changing and remote work is becoming the future of how we work. After the COVID-19 pandemic, many things changed and the work culture shifted towards a hybrid working schedule.
However, many people are preferring remote work over office work, so maybe the future might entirely shift to remote work except for all the jobs that require workers to physically be there.
Larger organizations like Facebook, Google and others are making their employees work half the week from home and half of it from the office, but this might change in the future. We’ll have to wait and see what’s going to happen.