Outsourcing employees can bring several advantages to your business, but communication is a huge barrier in the process. Teams must remain cohesive, even when crucial components exist outside of your building. Equipping your team members to deal with these situations is the best course of action for businesses that decide to outsource.
Establish Communication
One of the best things you can do to help remote workers feel like they are a part of the team is to establish contact points. These remote workers should know who their direct supervisor is, and have methods for getting a hold of important people on your team. Designate managers that will be responsible for projects, schedule their available hours and provide methods to reach them. All important managers should have phone numbers where they can be reached, and a Skype name where someone can ping them.
Designating management in this way helps decrease the likelihood of setbacks that may arise from internal disputes, or a lack of communication. It also helps to start an email chain so that you can trace commitments back to their source and hold employees accountable.
Project Tracking
Knowing the roadblocks that your employees face during the development process would be helpful. You could try to work with employees to remove those obstacles, or delegate other tasks while waiting on the completion of something else.
Software like Basecamp is familiar to freelancers, and it allows for this kind of high-level tracking. Basecamp lets you develop a task list, assign those tasks to someone else and check in on status updates along the way. Employees can also attach documents and files to help keep projects in an easy-to-access space.
Some task management programs even let you estimate the time it will take to complete something. This helps managers gauge their expectations based on the tasks an employee delivers. For instance, in the development philosophy “Agile,” leads must frequently work with fake units of time measurement in order to guess at when a project will finish. This also helps developers track snags they hit along the way, keeping accountability at the forefront of the process.
Remote Access Software
Remote access software like Simple Help offers remote access to a PC for the purpose of presentations and support. You can use this kind of software to hold webinars online, or train employees remotely by taking temporary control of their computers. Combined with a microphone and a mobile device, it’s both a valuable form of training as well as a way to use your computer from a remote location.
Tools in the Cloud
Microsoft SkyDrive and Google’s Drive suite of cloud applications have become a staple of the small business atmosphere. They are easy programs to encourage user collaboration, and they host important documents offsite in spaces where they are easily accessible. The Google Apps suite is especially useful for businesses who subscribe to Google Apps. These apps also track changes to a version of a document, helping the higher-ups decide which iteration is the best and allowing for plenty of internal testing before deployment.
SMART Goals
A great manager sets measurable goals for employees, which translates to measurable outcomes based on those goals. When working with remote employees, expectations and quality are important to address. Be clear with your new hires about what your goals are for their projects. Here are some examples of goals that you can adapt for your personal use:
· Improve email deliver-ability, or brainstorm better subject lines that get people clicking.
· Improve social interactions, mentions and re-tweets.
· Target new keywords for SEO and start a campaign to rank for them.
If you assign real numbers to these goals, you will have measurable outcomes that you can use to determine the effectiveness of your campaigns and your employees.
