Working remotely, remote work is becoming more common among companies. They are looking for experts around the world to hire for their projects. But as always there are two sides to the coin.
There is a list of posts all over the internet with the opinion, arguments on how remote working is good and bad. Furthermore, there is a heating debate between remote employees and employers who consider working remotely not a good choice from their past experiences.
Some agencies talk about their failed attempt to build a remote team. Their experience of hiring remote workers and getting disappointed.
Through our research, we have found several opinions from the perspective of both employees and employers to understand the challenges of hiring a virtual team. For the research, we have taken the views of real people from the HackerNews forum to have a clear and reliable opinion for you.
Here are the outcomes through which we managed to get Top 5 Disadvantages of Working from Home and their countermeasures.
- Community and Cultural differences
Working remotely doesn’t give you the flexibility and convenience that you have in office work culture. A major challenge is that you and your virtual team members not necessarily belong to the same culture.
Solution: –
- Manage to get together your team in person at least once a year
- Prepare your team with knowledge of your company’s needs.
- Provide an Online meeting place for sharing thoughts, ideas, suggestions, queries between team members.
- Lacking communication and understanding
Not all you team members need to have the same spoken language while working remotely. This situation can cause difficulty between employers and employees in understanding.
Solution: –
- Have virtual meetings
- Get project management tools
- Invest in communication structures
- Low reliability and retention
Reliability is an issue that frequently occurs between managers and team members. It takes time to build trust between team members and employers to rely on each other.
Solution: –
- Hiring the right employee, looking over their past experiences.
- Document the processes of each employee. So that if someone leaves it will save you time in training other employees you hire.
- Use content checking software.
- Difficulty in managing and maintaining accountability
Strategies that managers follow in an office working space to manage their team do not work. In remote working, it’s hard to keep the accountability of workers.
Solution: –
- Use a time tracking tool for monitoring your employee performance and productivity.
- Have a culture of transparency.
- Payment and logistic issues
Well, it can be a headache to manage your international transfers following tax laws. Giving cheques is easier than paying an international team.
Solution: –
- Get a tax filing service or software
- Use software that can integrate easily with worldwide payment methods like PayPal, Google Pay.