Organizing a Team of Employees Working in Various Locations
It is quite common these days for companies to not have their employees all working in the same place. They try allowing workers to be in different stations based on convenience or proximity to the nature of the job. For instance, women who are highly qualified but are unable to travel to an office could work from home. Engineers who need to inspect sites need to work on those places.
Organizing your team could be quite challenging. However, since you belong to the same group, you need to find a way to organize everyone. These are some tips to help you achieve that goal.
Setup a group chat
It is easy sending information to everyone regardless of location if you have a group chat. It is crucial that you send the same message to each member to make sure you are all on the same page and avoid miscommunication. You may also have different smaller groups depending on the teams and departments within the company. It also speeds things up instead of relying on email responses which could take quite a while.
Organize a weekly video conference
You do not need to meet everyone or be in the same location at once. It is possible for you to set up a video conference each week to ensure that everyone can give updates. If there are concerns in every site, you can also address them during the conference. It saves a lot of money too. Instead of spending money and resources sending employees to a common place to have a meeting, you can use that money for other more important things.
Visit the employees
As the boss, it is still crucial that you maintain professional and personal relationship with your employees. Maintaining a professional relationship despite the distance is easy. The difficult part is establishing a personal relationship among all employees. You do not see them in person and you could not have random small talks. Therefore, it helps if you also visit them wherever they may be working. It is a way of making them feel that they matter to you just like everyone else.
Be fair
Regardless of the location, you need to evaluate everyone using the same standards. You need to offer the same percentage for performance bonuses. You also need to require the same tasks for the same posts. Wages should also be determined fairly based on the nature of the job. People working in difficult and remote places must be given additional fees. It also helps attract more people in your team to take the said post.
It takes a lot to survive this setup when running a business. You need to be patient and make sure you are in control of what is going on. Sometimes, it is easy to get confused given the things happening at the same time. Hopefully, you can manage all your employees well.
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