Working remotely comes with its own challenges, and even though more and more employees are clamoring for remote positions, it is critical that employers are well attuned to the obstacles that come with such roles and can find resources to address them. For a stable remote workforce, it is critical for employers to be aware of the challenges their remote employees are facing. Left unaddressed, small problems grow into insurmountable problems that undermine collective productivity and employee satisfaction. Employers have a variety of tools and resources to offer their employees to tackle these challenges:
Isolation and Poor Mental Health
Isolation, which can easily lead to poor mental health, tends to remain on top of the list of challenges facing remote workers. When working in an office environment, it is easy to make friends with colleagues; however, enjoying social time with colleagues remotely is much more difficult and oftentimes does not resolve the lack of in-person interaction people crave during their work day. Employers can do more than offer their remote employees memberships to coworking spaces. They can proactively encourage remote employees to map out their days with social activities in mind, and prioritize mental health in their company culture.
Communication and Working Across Different Time Zones
Remote teams use a variety of tools for communication – from email to Slack and everything in between, it’s not always easy to figure out how best to reach your colleagues through which communication platform for a specific topic or question. Many remote workers report experiencing communication fatigue because they are constantly solicited on a number of different platforms with varying levels of urgency. Employers should be cognizant of the communication pathways they promote for their teams, especially when team members are working across multiple time zones. When something is urgent in the US, it may be a time when colleagues in Asia are sleeping. Integrating tools that help to visualize employees’ availability quickly is critical in this respect.
Read more about running effective hybrid meetings here.
Work-Life Balance
The line between work and home gets blurry very quickly when working remotely. Remote workers often choose remote jobs because they offer so much flexibility, but quickly realize that they end up working a lot more than they would in the office. The major reason this tends to happen is a lack of daily organization and routine management on the part of the employee. Employers can encourage employees to be thoughtful and proactive about the organization of their days, blocking out time slots on their calendars that are dedicated to personal time and activities. New employees, especially, hesitate to ask about working hours, and find themselves burned out too early in their journeys in new jobs.
At Jobkast, we not only help employers find the right remote talent anywhere in the world, but we also help employers to create the culture it takes to keep and develop this talent over the longer term. Our job is to be on top of remote work trends so that our employers don’t have to be.
