How to Set Employee Expectations for Remote Work?

In the post-pandemic world, remote work has become a new work culture. With reliable remote work solution, employees can have increased flexibility, better work-life balance, high productivity, and job satisfaction. The Gallup Survey – 2022 revealed that 80% of people are already engaged in either hybrid or remote jobs. The shift is on the rise as more organizations move towards hybrid and remote work models.

Organizations must be more agile in supporting their remote employees. It helps them adapt to this evolving business operations landscape and helps remote teams work successfully. It includes setting up new and agile methodologies that address the modern challenges of remote work culture. With a traditional approach and outdated policies, remote teams become highly unproductive and unsatisfied.

This blog will walk you through the different aspects of the remote work model to set employee expectations for remote work and get the most out of their productivity and efficiency.

5 Steps to Set Employee Expectations for Remote Work

Due to communication barriers and lack of visibility, team leads often try to micromanage their remote or hybrid employees. It leads to poor job satisfaction and reduced productivity as employees perform defensively to counter the lack of trust and delegation.

Setting precise and transparent expectations related to performance & communication can help organizations limit micromanagement and allow your remote team to perform at their best.

Below are 5 crucial steps to set employee expectations for remote work that ensures an organization’s productive and successful work culture.

1. Define a clear roadmap for remote collaboration

Reducing all types of communication barriers for improved collaboration is critical for the success of remote work. The organizations must be clear about essential Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), reporting time, and the team’s structure from the beginning. It is important to define roles and reporting authorities, so remote team members know the right person to approach and discuss different aspects and potential roadblocks. Below are a few questions that must be asked to set remote team expectations right in terms of communication and collaboration throughout the project timeline.

• What should be the best communication medium and tools for regular meetings, updates, managing tasks, and tracking progress?
• Which serves the organization’s interests well; pre-defined or flexible work hours? In the case of flexible work hours, it is mandatory to choose overlapping time slots for all meetings to ensure the presence of all remote employees.
• How to connect in case of any urgent and critical task?

Answering these questions and making it obligatory for your remote teams to follow the decided methods and policies to establish a transparent and clear direction of communication and collaboration.

2. Discuss Work Hours and Availability

Flexibility is the top reason that makes employees engaged in remote work satisfied with their job. But flexibility can also lead to reduced productivity and lack of motivation. Without regular scrum meetings, pre-defined guidelines, and progress tracking, your remote teams will fail to deliver and start missing important deadlines.

A straightforward approach to address potential challenges with flexible working hours is to discuss and set mutually decided working hours with remote employees. Another effective way is to follow a hybrid of flexible and fixed working hours by asking your remote teams to remain available for a set number of hours. It also helps remote employees to stay focused, follow a balanced lifestyle, and deliver quality work.

3. Decide Clear Project Objectives and Outcomes

Most businesses try to burden their remote employees with many must-to-do tasks and expect them to stay busy and produce more quality. Remember, an unsatisfied and burnt-out employee cannot produce quality work. It is vital to understand and implement result-oriented & intelligent ways of doing work instead of burdening your employees by pushing them to their limits. Managers and senior leadership should define clear project outcomes and efficient roadmaps to achieve critical objectives. It helps remote and in-house employees to align their tasks towards a common goal and stay connected throughout the project lifecycle.

4. Regular Scrum Meetings

Employee productivity, alignment, and mental health can easily be ignored during remote work. It has adverse outcomes regarding productivity and employee satisfaction, leading to high employee turnover. Senior leadership and managers’ sole responsibility is to arrange regular scrum meetings. Scrum meetings not only allow your remote teams to remain aligned and responsible but also help you to evaluate if they are doing well in remote environments. They might need additional assistance, consultancy, and discussions to do their job effectively.

Connecting with employees personally is also important to determine if they are going through any mental stress and seeking mentorship.

5. Technology and Digitization

Digital and cloud technologies can help organizations set expectations for remote teams by deploying modern tools and platforms that facilitate communication, collaboration, accessibility, transparency, and productivity. Specifically, cloud technologies play a vital role in this regard by enabling remote employees to access and share information and resources from anywhere and anytime.

Moreover, cloud-based free project management software enables remote teams to easily track and manage tasks, workflows, deadlines, progress, and objectives of active projects. It ensures that every team member is aligned with the mutual objective and working towards the same interests.

Tips: How to Support and Manage Remote Teams?

Below are some vital tips to support and manage remote teams effectively and ensure a healthy & productive remote environment:

• Provide all the necessary tools, software, and resources that are vital for the productivity and collaboration of your remote teams.
• Arrange regular training and development sessions to keep your remote employees upskilled for remote work and their designated job roles.
• Host webinars where you invite experienced guest speakers to educate your employees efficiently and effectively while providing training and professional development opportunities.
• Ensure an environment of community and well-being to integrate a positive and collaborative remote culture.
• Encourage remote employees to use different collaboration tools for video conferences, document sharing, and progress tracking.
• Trust your remote employees and refrain from micromanaging everything.
• Foster the culture of delegating unimportant and mundane tasks to AI tools and softwares to allow team members to focus on core project areas.
• Provide consultancy and necessary resources for the mental well-being of your remote employees.
• Offer incentives such as rewards or thank you gifts to remote team members to recognize and embrace their contributions.

How is V2 Cloud adding value to the remote work culture?

V2 Cloud is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution provider that allows remote teams to remotely access essential work assets, project files, and resources from their PCs or tablets connected to the internet. V2 cloud is known for adding value to the remote work culture by offering remote employees flexibility and a secure work environment. It also employs state-of-the-art security features to protect sensitive organizational information and data from cyber threats.

If you want to reduce the cost associated with maintaining and upgrading software and hardware systems for your evolving business needs, Choose V2 cloud. It helps you ensure seamless and secure remote access to business resources for your remote teams, spare your IT budget, and focus your monetary resources on core business areas.

Written By: Haziqa Sajid