Hiring and Retaining Remote Workers

If you are hiring a remote team or just a couple of remote workers, keeping them happy and motivated can be a challenge. In fact, you may even experience high turnover rates at first. This post will take you through some ways you can reduce staff turnover for remote workers.

Assess the Reasons Why People Leave

If you are experiencing high staff turnover of remote workers, it’s a good idea to sit down and draw up some reasons why that could be.

You might not even be looking for just one problem. The problem could be with the way the business is run, how remote workers are managed or simply that the worker in question isn’t suited to remote work.

Common problems with remote teams include lack of guidance, loneliness, poor communication or poor work-life balance (flexible hours can sometimes feel like all-hours).

A good method to fix this is to assess your own process of hiring remote workers and see if there’s any room for improvement. Do new remote workers get all the information they need? Do they know who to turn to if they have questions? Or are they just left in the dark?

Next, look at how you manage your team. When was the last time you spoke to your remote workers beyond email? When was the last time your team got together over a video call?

On the other hand, are you expecting daily video chats? Do employees look unmotivated or overwhelmed if you’re expecting them to constantly be online and available for a call?

It might be worth directly asking employees or even sending out an anonymous survey to your remote workers for some honest feedback. No one will have a better idea of how the team feels than the team itself.

Keeping Employees Happy and Informed

Remote work is a great incentive for many people. However, after a while the novelty can start to wear off. It might not be enough to simply let employees work from home.

Set Flexible Hours

It’s tempting to set the same working hours for your remote workers as you would in an office. However, this can sometimes take away the benefits of remote working. Instead, many businesses are finding flexible working hours much more beneficial. This allows employees to choose the time of day to work that suits them best and it allows them to fit in personal errands throughout the day.

Lots of business owners struggle to trust their employees when it comes to remote working and your employees will definitely notice if this is the case. Ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to lose staff.

Communicate and Find a Balance

Communication is key to any office, remote or otherwise but it can be difficult to find a balance with remote workers. As the boss, it’s your responsibility to prioritise communication across the team. Most businesses will set up a weekly video call with the team which helps get everyone on the same page.

This is a great way for employees to feel up-to-date with all the latest business news and helps them feel less isolated from the team.

Offer Personal Support

One downside of remote offices is that all the communication quickly becomes about the business and nothing else. Employees end up missing out on the general chit-chat of office life. It’s also hard to tell if one of your workers is struggling or dealing with personal issues.

It might be worth spending some time each week to reach out to all your remote workers to ask them how things are going and whether they need help with anything.

 

Are You Hiring People Who Are a Good Fit for Remote Work?

Remote work is simply not for everyone. Some people love it, some people hate it. Some people struggle with the loneliness of remote work and end up leaving.

When hiring new people, it’s definitely worth spending some time getting to know candidates and assessing whether they’d be well suited to remote work. If you want to reduce turnover, this is an important step in the recruitment process.

 

Have you struggled with remote worker retention? What strategies would you recommend to keep remote workers happy? Leave your thoughts below.