Want to start or grow your business during COVID-19? You need to get comfortable with starting, managing, and growing a remote team.
This is going to be true even after we’re allowed to return to the office en-masse. 76% of employees in a Global Workplace Analytics survey said that they want to keep working from home at least occasionally. Having the foundation to allow employees to work-from-home will be a significant advantage for attracting and retaining talent.
In this article I will cover:
Download this work from home policy template and tailor it to fit your company's needs
Before jumping straight into hiring remote workers you need to have a clear vision of how the remote employees will function in your business. Will you be a fully-remote company with no need for a traditional office space, or will you operate with a hybrid workforce that includes both in-office and remote employees?
Remote First:
Remote-first companies like Buffer and Zapier exclusively hire remote workers. The work that they do is entirely compatible with this sort of environment and they can hire talent from all across the globe.
Remote Friendly:
Before the pandemic forced an influx of employees to work remotely, companies like Microsoft and Slack were what I would call “remote friendly”. These companies operate with a hybrid workforce that mixes in-office and remote employees. They openly support allowing their employees to work remotely where possible, but they do not necessarily hire remote workers by default.
Remote Compatible:
Remote compatible simply means that there are roles within the organization that are compatible with remote work, but the organization lacks the infrastructure and remote-friendly culture to be able to grow a remote workforce. Companies that fall under this category may not support remote work at all or only allow employees to work remotely under special circumstances.
Being a remote-first or remote-compatible business provides you with unique hiring opportunities. Since your employee’s role is location independent you could hire suitable talent from virtually anywhere in the world.
That said, you may not necessarily want to forgo considering location altogether. There are times where you will want to hire remote employees from a closer geographical area to your headquarters.
As an employer you need to ensure that your employees have the tools they need to work remotely. When you are first getting started you will find that there is no shortage of tools and platforms for enhancing the remote work experience. While not every offering is truly necessary, there are a few key resources that will make or break your remote workforce management experience.
How you approach the recruitment of your remote workforce will make or break the experience for you. You will not only need to adapt your hiring process to fit a virtual environment, you will also need to reevaluate the skills you are looking for to ensure that your new hires will function well in a working environment with reduced visibility.
To find remote workers it helps to go where they are. Remote-exclusive platforms like WeWorkRemotely and Remote.co are a great way to find talent with previous remote work experience.
You can also use the very same online application management processes you’ve used before to source talent from mainstream job sites so long as you emphasize the remote nature of the role.
When hiring remotely it’s best to do live video interviews so you can get real-time face-to-face interaction with your prospective employee. With COVID-19 in full force, in-person interviews aren’t really recommended anyway.
Larger companies or those with limited resources to meet each applicant face-to-face may also want to consider a pre-interview process where they provide pre recorded video responses to a list of behavioral, cultural, and/or technical questions.
When I’m hiring remotely I also like to conduct a brief case study or project style interview where they can demonstrate their working style and skills. For example when I was hiring for a marketing coordinator I knew that they needed to have excellent writing skills; their project consisted of writing a 500-word sample article on a topic of their choice and then we assessed their writing style and knowledge to determine if they were a fit for our organization.
Tips for performing a case study / technical interview:
Your remote team is going to be largely talking to one another through text. A candidate that can clearly communicate their intended message through text will save precious time on clarification and miscommunication. This is particularly important once you start factoring in employees across multiple time zones where opportunities for real-time communication are sparse.
While it’s true that the majority of employees genuinely want to provide an honest effort, the fact of the matter is that there are some employees that are susceptible to performance drops when they’re not surrounded by their coworkers and managers. A truly successful remote worker is one that can simply be provided with clear direction and trusted to see their responsibilities through.
Remote employees will often not have the convenience of frequent 1-on-1 communication with their managers. Your potential hire needs to be comfortable with managing their own priorities so they can focus on their most important tasks when they do not have an immediate opportunity for clarification.
Onboarding is often a major struggle when hiring remotely. A well thought out onboarding plan is particularly important for remote employees as they don’t have as many opportunities to organically integrate into the company.
Tips for onboarding remote employees:
Remote workers have provided security teams with a great challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations have been forced to provide secure remote working arrangements at a time where the network perimeter has been obliterated.
While it’s certainly a unique challenge, there are steps security teams can take to protect their organizations against the security risks of remote workers.
In this article for SC Magazine CurrentWare’s managing director Neel Lukka provides 4 major tips for improving the security of work-from-home employees.
Starting and growing a remote workforce is a unique management challenge. With the right combination of tools, processes, communication skills, and a thorough vetting process your employees can remain productive no matter where they work.
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
__cfruid | session | Cloudflare sets this cookie to identify trusted web traffic. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement | 1 year | Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category . |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional | 11 months | The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". |
JSESSIONID | session | The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. |
LS_CSRF_TOKEN | session | Cloudflare sets this cookie to track users’ activities across multiple websites. It expires once the browser is closed. |
OptanonConsent | 1 year | OneTrust sets this cookie to store details about the site's cookie category and check whether visitors have given or withdrawn consent from the use of each category. |
viewed_cookie_policy | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
__cf_bm | 30 minutes | This cookie, set by Cloudflare, is used to support Cloudflare Bot Management. |
_zcsr_tmp | session | Zoho sets this cookie for the login function on the website. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_calendly_session | 21 days | Calendly, a Meeting Schedulers, sets this cookie to allow the meeting scheduler to function within the website and to add events into the visitor’s calendar. |
_gaexp | 2 months 11 days 7 hours 3 minutes | Google Analytics installs this cookie to determine a user's inclusion in an experiment and the expiry of experiments a user has been included in. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_ga | 2 years | The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors. |
_ga_GY6RPLBZG0 | 2 years | This cookie is installed by Google Analytics. |
_gcl_au | 3 months | Provided by Google Tag Manager to experiment advertisement efficiency of websites using their services. |
_gid | 1 day | Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. |
CONSENT | 2 years | YouTube sets this cookie via embedded youtube-videos and registers anonymous statistical data. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_opt_expid | past | Set by Google Analytics, this cookie is created when running a redirect experiment. It stores the experiment ID, the variant ID and the referrer to the page that is being redirected. |
IDE | 1 year 24 days | Google DoubleClick IDE cookies are used to store information about how the user uses the website to present them with relevant ads and according to the user profile. |
NID | 6 months | NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads. |
test_cookie | 15 minutes | The test_cookie is set by doubleclick.net and is used to determine if the user's browser supports cookies. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 5 months 27 days | A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. |
YSC | session | YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. |
yt-remote-connected-devices | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. |
yt-remote-device-id | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. |
yt.innertube::nextId | never | This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
yt.innertube::requests | never | This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_dc_gtm_UA-6494714-6 | 1 minute | No description |
_gaexp_rc | past | No description available. |
34f6831605 | session | No description |
383aeadb58 | session | No description available. |
663a60c55d | session | No description available. |
6e4b8efee4 | session | No description available. |
c72887300d | session | No description available. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-tracking | 1 year | No description |
crmcsr | session | No description available. |
currentware-_zldp | 2 years | No description |
currentware-_zldt | 1 day | No description |
et_pb_ab_view_page_26104 | session | No description |
gaclientid | 1 month | No description |
gclid | 1 month | No description |
handl_ip | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_landing_page | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_original_ref | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_ref | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_ref_domain | 1 month | No description |
handl_url | 1 month | No description available. |
handl_url_base | 1 month | No description |
handlID | 1 month | No description |
HandLtestDomainName | session | No description |
HandLtestDomainNameServer | 1 day | No description |
isiframeenabled | 1 day | No description available. |
m | 2 years | No description available. |
nitroCachedPage | session | No description |
organic_source | 1 month | No description |
organic_source_str | 1 month | No description |
traffic_source | 1 month | No description available. |
uesign | 1 month | No description |
user_agent | 1 month | No description available. |
ZCAMPAIGN_CSRF_TOKEN | session | No description available. |
zld685336000000002056state | 5 minutes | No description |