Strategies For Leading a Remote Workforce

Publicity For Good has operated remotely since the very beginning, all the way back in 2016, and while that has meant working through technical issues and the eventual miscommunication, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

However, that has not been the case for every company that has tried to work on an exclusively remote regimen, so I figure that today, I’d be sharing some of the secrets that have ensured our team could work from across several countries with complete comfort.

Challenges

Despite being a wonderful format that has worked for Publicity For Good and many other companies, there are some key challenges that anyone with a global team like ours will have to deal with.

No Face-to-face supervision: A big advantage of in-person work environments that often gets overlooked is the ability to simply turn around and ask your manager when they have a question. Likewise, the ability to supervise your team’s work in real time makes leading them an easier job for many leaders. In a digital setting, this advantage is negated.

Difficult Access to information: If you’re a new worker in a remote company, a large chunk of your time will be dedicated to learning the ropes, which naturally involves asking questions. However, asking your coworkers for information via chat tends to be a slower process that typically draws away time and effort that could be better employed elsewhere.

Social Isolation: Loneliness is a very real and prolific problem in society today, and remote work can contribute to it if an employee has a tendency to feel lonely or isolated. Of course, working in-person doesn’t mitigate that, but one must only remember the pandemic to recall that being outside is a need that must be addressed in other ways when you are working from home.

Distractions at home: Between family, kids, noisy neighbors and your own TV, your home is full of potential distractions that will require you and your team to set up and follow a very clearly laid out work schedule.

Strategies 

I’m not mentioning these challenges to discourage you from organizing your team remotely, but rather for you to get a clear picture of what you’re getting into. And as we’ll see below, these challenges can be mitigated by applying the following strategies:

Communication: This is the very cornerstone of remote work. If you want to mitigate the effects of social isolation and make finding information easy for the members of your team, communication needs to be at the forefront of your company’s culture.

You can do this by establishing periodic team-wide meetings and making use of communication software like slack. However, the single most important way to improve communication in your company is to be there for your employees when they need you and incentivize them to do the same for their colleagues.

Work Management: Likewise, you will need a platform to distribute and track the different tasks for your team and ensure that everyone has access not just to the software, but also has the necessary equipment to use it like a phone and computer. At PFG, we use Airtable for its customizability and efficiency, but here are a few others that you can try out: 

• Trello: A visual tool for organizing tasks and projects using boards, lists, and cards.
• Asana: A comprehensive project management tool that helps teams organize, track, and manage their work.
• Monday.com: A flexible work operating system that enables teams to build custom workflows.

Regular Training: Technologies have never evolved so fast and for a company to succeed it needs to help its employees gain the necessary skills to implement them. Besides, steady skill development and personal growth should be the norm if you want your team to feel accomplished, no matter what new tool you’ll be using. So invest heavily in training programs and tools that could make your and everyone else’s job easier.

Time Management: Something we implemented here at Publicity For Good that has worked great so far is treating our workers like adults. They are the ones that need to manage their daily routines in order to ensure all responsibilities are met, and they can do that because we clearly communicate to them what these responsibilities are. When or how they get it done is up to them.

Team Bonding: Giving your team plenty of opportunities to get to know each other and bond is also important. They are going to be seeing their colleagues every single day on calls and talk to them constantly over slack, so we make sure that they are not strangers to each other. This can happen naturally over meetings, but if you want to ensure that your employees are bonding, just try to take an active interest in their lives. Ask questions, tell stories, tell jokes, share values, in essence, talk.

Global Compliance: Another extremely significant part of managing a global team is to do your homework on the laws and work regulations of each of their countries in order to make sure you will not run into any trouble with them in the future. Adherence to global compliance is what ensures that you will not lose your employees due to unforeseen legal complications that require you to follow laws you never heard about.

Managing a global team like the one we have at Publicity For Good is a challenging but extremely rewarding experience, largely because we have taken the steps to learn from our mistakes and make sure everyone can feel safe and relaxed from knowing what is expected.

So, if you’d like more practical advice on entrepreneurship, leadership and conscious business practices, feel free to like this article and connect with me through my LinkedIn profile. And if you feel like it’ll be beneficial, share it with someone that’s working to establish a global workforce for their business.