From start-ups to scale-ups, firms are looking to reduce overheads by harnessing virtual offices for their business operations. As a result, virtual workforces—employees who telecommute from home or other remote locations—have grown exponentially over the past few years, with 37% of workers already working or having previously worked virtually.
If you’re switching to a virtual office, make sure you give your company culture as much weight as your operations in the decision-making process. Here are a few tips to help this happen.
Focus on productivity
Many people think that running a business with a virtual office is different from running a business with traditional offices, but goals are largely the same. Complemented by collaboration tools and cloud computing, virtual offices can be just as productive as an office-based team.
Digital productivity tools like Asana, Trello and Basecamp are useful for businesses both within and without physical offices to help organise teams and tasks. There are tools like Skype to enable direct communication, and Join.me for screensharing. If you organise your team effectively, virtual teams can actually be more engaged than those who work out of physical offices. A study from MIT showed that dispersed teams can actually outperform groups that are colocated if effective strategies for collaboration are in place.
A study on remote work showed that the challenges of operating a virtual team can actually be a blessing in disguise. Virtual teams learn to communicate more deliberately and become less distracted as a result of being forced to work asynchronously as a member of a virtual workforce.
Emphasise the importance of ‘team’
The big names in ‘corporate culture’ like Facebook and Google instill a company culture through a giant, all-encompassing campus complete with inter-office slides and ping-pong tables. But critics have described this as a superficial culture, and shown that virtual workforces tend to form deeper bonds when working remotely. As Sqwiggle explains, a distributed team’s ability to work well together is built upon a foundation of trust, which creates a much tighter-knit culture of shared enterprise.
For some businesses, creating a solid team, one that is trusting of one another, means enforcing the rules. One reason bosses can be reluctant to enable remote workers is because of the challenges associated with ensuring employees work the hours for which they are being employed, and that they avoid slacking off. Setting some ground rules that employers can track and enforce not only secures their peace of mind, but it helps each individual feel like part of a more coherent and integrated team too.
At the same time, business leaders can benefit from encouraging employees invest more deeply in the business as a whole. Focus on a business plan: Give all employees a say in developing and using the plan, and allow them to contribute feedback to make the plan more effective. Transparency is key to ensuring employees feel part of the team, whether they’re sat 10 feet across an office or 10 hours across the world.
Enable opportunities for employee progression
Research also suggests that if you want to be promoted into a core role, putting in “passive face time” still matters to bosses, but one of the biggest complaints of remote workers is that they feel their work is inadequately recognised. This is often the result of unconscious decisions by managers, who associate someone’s physical presence in the office with traits like “commitment” and “reliability”.
Studies have found that people who work remotely can receive lower performance evaluations, smaller pay rises and fewer promotions, regardless of performance level. Given that promotions or rewards in traditional settings mean such things as being given a better parking space or bigger office, it’s no wonder remote employees can feel a little underappreciated.
It’s important, then, that business managers have adequate progression plans in place for remote employees, that adequately track their progress, contribution, and enable them to upskill, such as conducting regular one-to-ones. HR tools such as Fairsail, a cloud-based Human Resources Information System, can be a particularly useful way of ensuring no employee falls off the radar, helping business leaders keep track of employees and support them in their career ambitions.
Remember: a virtual office doesn’t have to be virtual
To help prevent the ‘cog in the machine’ mentality that can avail remote workers, meeting in person still matters. Just because a virtual office doesn’t occupy a physical office space, that doesn’t mean you can’t all meet up from time to time. If you have a small team, encourage members to get to know each other by hosting regular video chats, meetups—even secret santa exchanges—and you’ll likely find employees begin to initiate those interactions on their own.
i2 Office are virtual office providers who supplement their mail and call forwarding service by enabling business owners to hire meeting rooms and even serviced office spaces at their virtual addresses whenever they need. What this means is that businesses who operate from a virtual office most of the time can choose to gather their remote teams in one location from time to time when they need to discuss important business strategy or simply check in.
Above all, make sure you bring your business back down to earth by focusing on tangible measures of success. Things can feel a little fleeting or abstract when there’s no physical office to serve as a base, so give your employees some structure and insight into what your business has achieved. It might be as simple as offering sales data in an internal newsletter, or sharing testimonials from customers that prove the good work your ‘virtual office’ has done. This will help your remote team stay focused on what’s important, and helps build a culture around common goals.
