Building a remote team is about finding the right people, managing time correctly, and communication. What may seem challenging at first becomes much easier once you understand how your employees work, what their needs are, and how to provide them with the information and tools they need.
Recruit Employees that Suit your Needs
Before you start, figure out what you need from your employees and what your budget is per employee. Don’t forget to think out of the box – for example if you cater to the U.S. market and think you need a native English speaker – re-evaluate. Do you need someone that will assist you with chat customer service? Plenty of people around the world speak English fluently and can complete the task just as well as any native speaker. Do you need someone to work night shifts? May be easier to find someone outside the U.S. in a different time zone to work those shifts.
Remember, if someone doesn’t have the exact skill set that you’re looking for, then training for remote workers is also a possibility. No one knows exactly what they’re doing when they walk into an office on the first day of work. For example, if you’re looking for someone to input data into an excel in a certain way, that’s a trainable skill. If you need someone that works with Quickbooks then you’re best off finding someone that already has the experience.
Testing Period
The testing period for your remote employee should be heavily monitored. This is your chance to properly train them to complete tasks properly, show them where to access the information they need, properly implement processes that work for both of you, and leave yourself satisfied knowing the work will get done. Teramind helps train employees by providing you features that allow you to monitor billable hours with live video and historical playback, take control of employees’ desktops for training, define rates per hour, and assign task per individual remote worker. With each task assignment, Teramind shows you how long each task took and how much money you spent per task.
So how does this work?
The employee needs to install the Teramind reveal agent and click start when the begin their day of work. Using the live view and historical playback feature allows employers to see their employee’s day through their eyes. Teramind can help you train employees during live sessions by giving you control over their screen. This means, employers can walk employees through company processes step by step. You can even join them for their tasks in the beginning and help guide them along the way so they don’t get stuck.
Additionally, employers can assign a task to each employee. So if you employ a remote sales team – you can have them track how much time they spent preparing proposals, speaking with potential clients or just surfing the net. This feature allows employers to fully understand how much their processes cost. Then its up to you to decide if you’re getting the correct return on investment!
With Teramind, you can also choose to calculate salaries per productive hour. All you need to do is set the applications, websites, processes that your company finds productive and you’ll be given a clear break down via our widget how much time was spent idle or outside of the defined productive activities.
Monitoring Continued throughout the Employment Cycle
Remote employee monitoring is important to continue past the testing period. It’s important to remember that employers can turn off the employee monitoring agent if they need to take care of a personal tasks. Most employees are accepting of the features because they understand that the software is there to protect them as well. Sometimes projects take longer than expected, untruthful complaints are filed, data goes missing. Teramind provides remote employees the safety and confidence they need to do their job best and ensures that they don’t get wrongly blamed.
In order to ensure that your company’s standardized policies are being followed, alerts can be set for behavior that may endanger your organization. Additionally, remember that your employees have access to sensitive data that needs to be protected. Continual monitoring of employees for any type of odd behavior can be crucial to your company’s safety.
Agreeing on Payment Terms
Setting out payment terms and conditions is crucial prior to beginning a contract with your remote employee. Payment regulation and culture differs around the globe so make sure to clarify how often employees will get paid, in what currency, and via what platform(paypal, payoneer, skrill). Make sure to speak with the employee on how many hours of work you expect them to have per week, so that they have the time to devote and understand what their income will be.
Company Communication
A good and organized communication method is very important to implement. First, clearly indicate what your preferred method of contact is and where you’re most likely to answer. Also – leave workers an emergency contact method as well. Make sure you clarify that employees should be mostly reachable during their work hours via the picked method ( some suggestions include slack, google chat, skype etc.) Also, if possible, create a group chat for workers so they can turn to each other for their work related issues. Also make sure important documents aren’t stores remotely. This makes updates, changes, and collaboration easier for the team.
About Teramind
Since 2014 over 4,000 organizations across all major industries have trusted Teramind to provide insider threat detection, data loss prevention and business process engineering through employee monitoring. By harnessing behavior analytics, the award-winning and top-rated platform has helped enterprises and organizations in finance, retail, manufacturing, energy, technology, healthcare, and government verticals detect, record, and prevent malicious user behavior while driving productivity and improving workflow efficiency. Available as a cloud-based, on-premise, or private cloud solution, Teramind’s data loss prevention and employee monitoring agent brings businesses peace of mind by providing data-backed workforce insights. Teramind is headquartered in Miami, Florida. Learn more about Teramind by visiting teramind.co or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Visit IT Security Central for the latest in security news and trends.