Building an Efficient Remote Workforce

At ABCD Technologies we have been helping organizations build remote teams and solve problems. Especially as regard accessing top African talents.

The advent of covid-19 was a game changer in how organizations operated. For long there was the argument on whether remote work reduced the efficiency of a workforce when compared to working on-site mostly because businesses could not micromanage as they would have wanted to or the argument most times was that it was difficult to determine performance as companies could not ascertain whether an employer worked several other jobs.

When covid happened it questioned a lot of these rhetorics and even with offices around the globe closed businesses were still able to function smoothly especially for service companies.

Since it has been proven beyond doubts that a remote work model works, the concern now is on how to build efficient teams.

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

What is remote work all about?

The idea of remote work is that a team can often can useful tasks completed and deployed to solved problems without the need for a physical space(office) or interaction. This means that a company can have members of its workforce working from different parts of the world across multiple time zones while still remaining productive.

This new normal as some would call it is something that more and more organizations are coming to favour more.

Benefits & Challenges of a remote work model

To be honest about it, this sort of work model has its pros and it cons like with every other thing in life.

Some benefits are:

• Reduces cost on capital expenses like office space and its accompanying property tax.
• Allows you to access different talents across the world with ease.
• Expands your hiring options.
• Best fit for startups starting small but hoping to scale.
• Cost efficient for the company as extra revenue can be channelled towards growing the business.

The challenges:

• Human-to-human interaction happens best in onsite work models.
• The is a possibility of having a less efficient workforce especially if tasks are not well defined per time.
• Employees can often find it difficult to maintain a healthy work-life balance.
• Some workers may experience issues with payments in their local currencies.

To balance out some of these challenges some organizations have opted for a hybrid work model which is a combination of the best from both worlds (remote & onsite).

How to build an efficient remote workforce

To build an efficient remote workforce there are some key points that are really essential. Here we go:

• Invest heavily on educating your employees on the company culture.
• Act out what you talk about with your teams.
• Normalize checking up on employees beyond work.
• Hire the best people on a scale based on their expertise and personality.
• Have great KPIs to ensure that employees can track their level of impact.
• I cannot emphasize enough on how important a good project/program/product manager is. This allows employees to know what tasks are important for each day.

I will come back to this post overtime to add valid points I believe would be more profound and helpful. In case you want to hire some of the best minds from Africa on your project, then reach out to me: otobong@abcdevs.com

Thanks for reading