Remote Work in 2022 | Best Practices on How to Improve Your Remote Team

COVID-19 brought a new era of remote working. While it was a forced measure for most businesses, now it can be clearly seen how things are going. In reality, this was not as challenging as most thought. In reality, remote work has become an excellent choice for many companies on the market that have been able to survive during this period.

Even though it has been almost two years since companies switched to remote work, some still struggle with the adaptation. And since the pandemic doesn’t seem to be over in upcoming years, companies need to organize their work in the best ways they can to still stay in demand on the market, provide quality solutions and reduce the stress that we all experience.

We at Interexy were ready for this global change. Since we have teams in various countries and were the first in the development market to start this transformation, today’s working process is smooth and hassle-free. This is why we created this guide to help you explore the best practices that we applied to organize remote work in 2022 and further. 

Remote Working Statistics that Will Surprise You

• According to the statistics, over 4.7 million people work remotely at least half the time in the United States now. 
• At the same time, 44% of companies in the US do not allow remote work, and only 16% of companies agree to hire workers for remote conditions. 
• When talking about the rest of the world, 16% of companies are fully remote, according to an Owl labs study. 
• The same report also shows that about 62% of workers aged 22 to 65 claim to work remotely at least occasionally.

Since most restrictions have been removed, many companies return to their previous offline conditions due to issues they experienced during remote work. While for some it makes sense, most businesses reported that remote work is one of the best solutions for them now. And if you are one of those companies who still work remotely and want to continue working this way, let’s explore what practices we used and use today to achieve the best results out of this digital transformation.

Best Practices for Remote Work at Interexy

Optimization of Digital Workflow

The first thing you need to do to reap benefits from remote work and then struggle with this transformation is to optimize your digital workflow. Since we have been working remotely with some teammates in the company, we just brought all these tips to the whole team. While Trello, Slack, and Notion have long been here and used only for small pieces of work, now these tools play critical roles in our working process.

Every department in our team uses different applications and services that help organize work and improve the quality of the final result. For instance, Jira is best for the development department. Trello is used by our marketing team as it is easier for them to manage work in this app. However, we all also use Slack as the best option for communication remotely. 

When these tools are used properly, the team can work smoothly and seamlessly when located in every corner of the world. However, you should also take time to explain how they should be used and show how the process should be structured in order to let these tools work the way you expect.

More Face-to-Face Calls

We all know how COVID-19 restrictions separated us from the rest of the world and from our loved ones. In addition, it became a real issue for people who like to chat with their colleagues. Even though everything can be discussed in Slack or any preferred working messenger, face-to-face calls allow people to feel the team spirit again.

At Interexy, every department provides calls almost every day. Some like to have calls three times a week, while managers are always here to jump on a quick call whenever their colleague needs them. Our calls are focused not only on discussing work questions, as we understand that it is also vital to discuss personal things and moods, support someone or help with any issue in their life. 

So combining both personal and working topics, we have been able to achieve better mental health for our employees and more awareness about the working process between departments.

Weekly Shout-Outs

Every person wants to feel their meaning to the team and the company. We believe that when employees know their significance to a company’s success and know how they contribute to it, we achieve the best results internally that will affect our external process as well. This is why we created weekly shout-outs to those who have shown their best efforts. Over time we have also seen a dynamic, so employees are more engaged in the whole process, join the discussions, better communicate with each other, and so on.

Add EOS System to Calls

Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) is a system used by numerous companies all across the world to help them clear their goals and achieve the company’s rocks. Even though we added this system only a few months ago, the results are amazing. Alongside two calls that last 20-30 minutes per week, every department now has a long call where we apply the EOS system. 

It allows us to go through good one personal and one working news, then we move to a to-do list where we discuss what we have done according to the list and if we need to reschedule something for some reason. Next, we go to our personal rocks that we set every month with the forecast period of one and three months. The last thing is our issue list, where all issues that appeared during the week are listed, and we discuss how we can solve them by putting something on the to-do list. 

Right People Right Seats (RPRS)

When working remotely, it could be hard for some people to figure out what they actually have to do and what tasks are out of their responsibilities. And this is one of the biggest problems that lead to mental burnout and poor quality work. This is why we now use the RPRS policy, where we check whether the responsibilities suit the chosen person and, if not, what we can do to resolve this issue as soon as possible. The same applies to our recruitment process, allowing us to get only the best candidates for a specific position and ensure the top-notch quality of the work.

Mental Health Matters

Since the pandemic caused many mental health issues in our employees and daily work isn’t easy, we ensure that every person can get needed professional help at any given time. We pay close attention to how our employees feel and how they work depending on their mental health. We understand the challenges they all have to come through now, which isn’t easy. So now we allow them to get three sick days without any reason or take a break when they need to maintain good mental health with salary compensation.

Maintain a Positive Company Culture

We believe that company culture plays a key role in success. Therefore, we took time to recreate our culture and morals depending on the world situation, and we shared our vision with every employee through department calls with our HRs. This gave us a competitive advantage in the turbulent market, where most companies were lost for a long period, struggling with identifying their position. Our company culture includes many things, where the most vital are:

• We are working smart, not hard;
• Take time when we need it
• Ask questions to find answers
• We are flexible and can adapt to changes;
• We are not afraid of sharing our thoughts;
• We always stay proactive.

Combining everything that we added to our company culture, Interexy is all about people. We show our commitment to every employee every day and strive to manage processes instead of people.

Provide Clear Guidelines And Set Expectations

Remote work is sometimes challenging. Sometimes not everyone understands what they need to do, in what timelines, and in what ways. This can become a huge process in the working mechanism of the company. This is why we make sure that every team member has their own goals and PGP plan, where we provide clear guidelines and expectations. This helps employees always to know the scope of work, correctly estimate it, and make it easier for them to achieve goals and contribute to company success.

Final Thoughts

With the new era of remote work that doesn’t seem to stop, you can either reap benefits or struggle with issues. Luckily, there are many tools and processes that companies, like Interexy, have applied to benefit from this transformation. This guide shows you our best practices and tips you can consider to organize your remote work and make it easier for you to go through these challenges.

FAQs

What does remote work mean?

Remote work means that your team works not from the offline office. They can work from home, be placed in different countries, or work from cafes but never at your office.

How to improve remote working?

You can improve your remote work by using apps and services designed for this purpose, making daily calls, using well-established practices like the EOS system, and more.

How can teamwork be improved remotely?

Teamwork can be improved remotely when you consider adding tools that we described in the article into your process.