7 Common Challenges with Remote Work (+Solutions)

Things around the world have been changing surprisingly fast. Some organizations have had to change their entire business models within a noticeably short time. Others have had to refresh their values, expertise, or culture to meet current demands. The world has changed and aligning employees to new priorities, means deprioritizing others. Communicating these changes and quickly realigning employees to new demands is already tough and is made more challenging with remote work.

(a) Strong Internal Communications

Have management frequently speak to staff on the direction that company is headed. Repetition is key when leading or implementing change. It helps guarantee clarity and ensures no one is left out. However, you would need to get creative with repetition, otherwise, employees ignore your message – this takes more finesse and skill. We encourage internal communication teams to find multiple creative ways to get the same idea out to their teams.

• Use a mixture of tools to communicate – in-person interviews features, animation, graphics, internal memos, and so on
• Reward employees and teams that adopt your messaging and use them as internal champions.
• Look for external people that could serve as champions to your new direction or strategy.

(b) Empowering your Managers

Empower Management on how to oversee work, manage employees effectively and be great bosses. We advise doing this through Manager Toolkits packs that contain FAQs and tips specifically designed for your culture and company.

Collaborating helps develop a sense of belonging within a team but also plays an important role in the transfer of knowledge and ideas through teamwork and coaching. Successful teams, leaders and individual’s collaborate. Usually, a high-performing individual tends to do individual and collaborative work in equal measures – 45% each, with the remaining 10% made up of learning and social time.

The Gensler Research Institute has researched workplace needs and behaviors for over 15 years. Research before the pandemic showed that U.S. workers spent an average of 43% of their time at work collaborating with their colleagues. That number fell to 27% for workers who worked from home in 2020. This means that people working full-time at home spent 37% less time collaborating than before the pandemic.

The lack of collaboration has an effect not only on culture and performance at work but also on softer and sometimes easily forgettable areas like coaching and mentorship.

(a) Inspiring Collaboration

Collaboration – communicating and working together effectively helps the team produce their best work. And HR and Communication Departments, along with corporate leaders and managers, need to use every tool at their disposal to underpin the importance of working together.

1. Use Internal Communication (IC) to remind employees to value collaborating and share tips on how they can effectively do so virtually. Use IC to profile previous times and projects where collaboration saved the day and resulted in success.
2. Team Building sessions help bring out the importance of collaboration and working together and show the flip side when teams and individuals work against each other.
3. Talk about the importance of collaboration and its effect on work during staff forums and all-hands meetings. Having ice-breakers or short exercises that help bring this point out helps greatly.

(b) Empowering your Managers

A year on, we have found that managers play the biggest role in ensuring that their teams effectively collaborate (no brainer). From dealing with conflict immediately when it arises, keeping updates and communication flowing, managers are ultimately your best bet to keep the ship moving in the right direction. Again; businesses need to empower their managers with the tools, know-how, and support to enable them to effectively lead their teams.

(c) Investing in Collaboration Tools

Like Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, collaboration and project management tools have become commonplace in many organizations and helped overcome some of the challenges associated with remote work. Some great picks are:

1. Asana
2. Trello
3. Favro
4. Basecamp

Trust becomes an issue when you cannot see physically see what someone is doing. In some of the companies that we have worked with over the last year, there are staff members who have never met in person. You would be surprised to learn that this has subconscious effects on trust.

To have your organization effectively work remotely, you will need to work on two kinds of trust – organizational trust (that the organization has the employee’s best interests at heart). And between teammates.

(a) Having Hard Conversations

Whether it is budget cuts, layoffs, or even people leaving the company. The truth is, people will still talk about these issues, and it helps to have the perspective of the people who made the decision. In an organization I once worked in, one of the leaders called it a “honey we need to talk” conversation. While they were hard to have helped build empathy, understanding, and ultimately loyalty and commitment to the direction of the organization.

(b) Developing a social contract

One of the exercises we help our clients with is developing a Social Contract. Every family, team, and group of human beings has a list of rules that they hold one another accountable to. This is a combination of your values and behavioral traits that you will hold one another accountable to as a team. Overcoming remote work challenges means having a team that is responsive and reliable, transparent, and honest, and leading by example. This is an example of important values to have in your social contract.

(c) Getting to Know One Another (Away from work)

We have spent the last year working on helping teammates that do not know one another connect. Bringing together people who have not been in person for weeks or months. And helping organizations combat loneliness. All through virtual team building sessions. From large groups to small groups we have Kenya’s most innovative virtual team building offering.

Poor productivity affects not only the project and work at hand, but also the individual’s psyche. You can become dispirited or even lose interest the longer it takes to complete a task. This not only makes you a less effective team member but in the long run, you eat into your personal life and time. Hat tip to the procrastinators reading this.

(a) Avoiding Multi-tasking

Multi-tasking has been shown to reduce productivity by 40%. So instead set a single goal or connected goals and focus on achieving that target.

(b) Working in short bursts

We lose focus on a single task after 5 – 20 minutes. Working in short bursts will keep you focused and increase your motivation once you have completed shorter and more achievable deadlines.

It takes 23 minutes to regain focus after being distracted. Distraction can be a big productivity killer. If you are working at home, this will sometimes be interpreted by your spouse or children that you are available. However, there are other distractions to be watchful of – social media, entertainment on Netflix, and other avenues.

Reducing Social Media and Messaging App Use

I have found it effective to activate focus mode on my phone. This allows me to only receive necessary notifications and focus on my work. Here’s how to do this on Samsung, if you have another device you can download any of these apps.

Individual performance is increasingly valuable to team success when working remotely. Completing work on time and being a dependable team member are important remote working traits.  Apart from affecting team success accomplishing your goals helps gives you confidence in your abilities.

Achieving goals is not easy. Whether you want to be better at time management, take a course to sharpen your skills, build your network, improve your quality of work, increase your sales, write a book, or get fit. Having SMART goals; an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals is great. However, meeting those goals is what keeps you engaged, and motivated.

Applying These Lessons

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones has a set of hacks that have worked for me over the last year. He says that “Goals are useful for setting the direction while systems are great for actually making progress.”

• Use Average Speed to your Advantage – it doesn’t take very long for average speed to give you astonishing results. This is the power of accumulative advantage. If your average speed is exercising twice per month, can you “graduate” that to once per week? Or if you make sales calls once a week, can you “graduate” to twice weekly?
• Ruthlessly Eliminate your Goals – you don’t need more time you just need to decide. The issue isn’t that you need bigger goals, more time, what you need is to ruthlessly prioritize.
• Stack your Goals – make a specific plan for when, where, and how you will perform the behavior. For example “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME OF DAY] at/in [PLACE].”
• Align your Environment with your Goals – If you sleep with your phone next to your bed, then checking social media and email as soon as you wake up is likely to be the default decision.

Read more on James’ goal-setting strategies here, and plan on buying his book.

Not switching off and unplugging from work affects your productivity, but also increases your chances to get burnout. One of the challenges of remote work is an increased workload and increased virtual meetings. We have written before on the illusion of virtual meetings and how they have influenced employee stress levels and virtual fatigue.

(a) Creating Boundaries

Set goals around your personal life, work, and hobbies. Next, figure out the competing factors you are working with – this could be family, entertainment, friends. And create boundaries that will help you with balancing your personal and work responsibilities. This will make it easier for you to know when to move from one engagement and to another.

(b) Not Multi-Tasking

Handling several projects makes it harder to know when to complete one and move to the next. This in turn makes it harder for you to close for the day and unplug from work. Have a set time to switch off. My focus application has a “family time” setting that switches off my email notifications at a certain time of the night and allows me to spend time with my family.

We spend a majority of our time awake at work, so it makes sense to have built long-term and fulfilling relationships with some of the people we work with. Today it is not surprising to hear of knowing someone has left the company when their emails bounce or being completely unaware for months. Being in the same office, having lunch together, meeting in a lift helped cement these relationships and build trust.

In his book, the Speed of Trust Stephen M.R. Covey says that “in a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.” Keeping employees connected helps not only beat loneliness but also builds trust.

Staying connected not only helps build trust but also helps with reminding employees that they are not alone. Here are a few ideas:

• Call teammates up randomly (not about work)
• Schedule frequent social sessions and take a class, take part in an activity.
• Get in touch with us, and leverage on our virtual engagement solutions.

All the best to you and your teams. Hope that you can crack the science behind managing effective and empowered remote teams. And as always don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need help in engaging your staff and communicating effectively.