Remote team management: are you ready to take the plunge?

Do you have mixed feelings about remote work, in other words teleworking, of your employees?

Understandable, but we want to reassure you: The positive aspects of remote work far outweigh its potential problems.

That said, it is important to take these issues into account. This is the key for remote to become a real performance driver for your business.

In this article, we start by offering you a Overview of the 5 main advantages of remote control in business. Then, we help you overcome 5 common problems associated with remote work, with the help of practical advice.

The objective? Take full advantage of this new organization of the world of work!

The 5 main advantages of working remotely

At Rzilient, we are convinced that remote control can bring many benefits to your business. As proof, more than 20% of our team works remotely!

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Benefit 1: Reduce your costs 📉💵

Professional offices are very expensive.

The simple fact ofSeating an employee in the office Costs on average more than €13,000 per year in France! Indeed, there are numerous investments:

• office rental;
• purchase of furniture;
• maintenance;
• safety;
• general services.

If your team is working remotely, you can reduce your real estate costs. This financial gain increases your ability to invest in profitable projects (commercial development, R&D, marketing, etc.), significantly. Take the example of a communication agency, with 20 employees, which decides to switch to 50% remote. His annual gain is of the order of 10 x €13k, i.e. €130,000 in savings!

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Benefit 2: Limiting the stress of your teams 💻😵

Thanks to the flexibility offered by teleworking, your employees can:

• Spend a lot less time in transport (the average time spent by employees in transport from home to work is around ¾ hours per day);
• enjoy more time with their family and to take care of them. For example, it is becoming possible to do sports at lunchtime;
• manage their household chores during their work breaks. This ensures that their evenings are quiet and without working from home.

These may seem like anecdotal considerations when it comes to running a business.

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In reality, these everyday details can make a huge difference in the quality of life of your teams. And who says better quality of work, also says a set of associated benefits:

• lower stress levels of your employees;
• Limiting absenteeism and sick leave;
• increased productivity.

Did you know that absenteeism costs an average of 4,000 euros per year and per employee in France?

In our fictional company, which is a communication agency with 20 employees, reducing absenteeism by 20% means saving €16,000 annually.

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Benefit #3: Access a larger talent pool 👌

Power recruit everywhere in France, or even in the world, means ensuring your business has access to a huge panel of talents and skills.

The advantages for your business are numerous:

• increase in the quality of your services;
• improving the satisfaction of your customers;
• and as a result, financial results (turnover and profitability) increased.

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Advantage 4: Benefit from significant CSR advantages ♻️

Teleworking is also accompanied by a significant reduction in your company's carbon and environmental footprint.

Less transport (often carried out by car) means tons of CO2 not emitted each year!

That is not all. Your employees working in the office also need:

• office buildings are built;
• then heated and maintained;
• and eventually renovated.

Knowing that the construction sector has a huge environmental impact, you are taking action for the planet by choosing remote!

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Benefit 5: Improving your employer brand and talent retention 🤝

Do you want to be overwhelmed by motivated and interesting applications?

Offering the possibility of working from home, whether full time or part time, is a good solution for attracting and retaining talent.

However, recruiting and retaining an employee costs a lot of money !

Teleworking is an excellent lever for the costs associated with recruiting and training new employees.

The 5 key challenges of teleworking

Let's be clear. Everything is not always rosy in the world of remote work. To protect you from the risks associated with this practice, we offer you a focus on 5 key issues to take into account.

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Issue 1: Communication 🗣️

Remote work makes The communication between your teams is more difficult.

This is especially the case if your teams work in different time zones. As such, let's take our marketing manager, Audrey, who is currently working from home in Mexico. The difficulties have been anticipated. Facilities have been put in place and are working perfectly! 💪

The key is toanticipate that remote work may complicate live meetings or real-time collaborations.

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Issue 2: Management 👨🏼 ‍ 💼👩🏽 ‍ 💻

With teleworking, managers mustadapt to a remote management style. This is very different from management in a traditional work environment.

Effective solutions exist:

• communicate effectively with their remote team (with tools such as Zoom, Teams, Meet or Slack);
• provide regular feedback on the work done;
• Make sure of the effective coordination of tasks, via project management tools (Asana, Trello, Airtable, Notion, etc.).

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Issue #3: Data Security 🔐

Working remotely can lead to increased data security risks. ⚠️

Many companies allow their employees to work from different locations, with personal devices as part of a BYOD policy.

This can compromise the security of corporate data.

But, again, the solutions exist! We detail them in our article on cybersecurity, and implement them as part of Rzilient's all-in-one IT management platform.

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Issue 4: The well-being of your employees 🧑🏻 ‍ 💻😊

The remote can be accompanied by feelings of isolation and stress with some of your employees.

To combat this risk, here are our tips. It is about:

• remain attentive to well-being of the team;
• ensure that your employees have equipment needed to work effectively remotely ;
• foresee moments of exchange “in real life” (such as seminars, “after work”, regular face-to-face meetings, etc.);
• alternate remote and face-to-face for the most affected employees.

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Issue #5: Productivity monitoring 📈

The last issue to be addressed when engaging your company in the direction of teleworking: productivity.

Some employees may be tempted to work less productively without direct supervision.

Management must therefore put in place safeguards to limit this risk, or even provide financial incentives.

You could consider, for example, a Salary increase for remote employees, in exchange for a moral agreement from them to work hard at home.

Given the savings your business makes thanks to remote working, this is a win-win approach.

As a general rule, the fact of empowering employees is accompanied by a stronger adherence to company values. It is rare for remote work to hinder the productivity of teams, quite the opposite.

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Remote control: a miracle solution, to be managed well

As we have seen, remote control brings a lot of advantages to your business! But it also comes with challenges that need to be addressed carefully.

As far as your IT is concerned, let us mention among these challenges cybersecurity and the organization of your computer and software equipment on the other hand.

The Rzilient platform was designed to help you on both levels. It includes:

• one comprehensive computer asset inventory tool. You save a lot of time on the management of onboarding and offboarding;
• tutti the tools you need to protect your business from cybersecurity risks (deployment of security policies, installation of antivirus in advance and data encryption).