The One Thing You Need to Know About Transitioning to a Virtual Workforce

The present and the future workplace has transformed like never before. The COVID-19 outbreak has led businesses to change the work patterns, daily routines, client meetings, workforce management, and a lot more.

This leads to the origin of virtual teams. Virtual teams provide managers an opportunity to build a dream team without boundaries. Also for employees, it offers the freedom and flexibility to achieve a healthy and safe work-life balance.

Communication can tumble if teams never meet face to face. Then trust and collaboration suffer, and sometimes employees are under too much pressure with bulky tasks.

Despite these challenges, as it’s a new normal now. The virtual workforce is here to stay for a long period. Remote working enables businesses to compete in this competitive world and adapt to the real challenges in the new workplace.

According to research from a Stanford professor, employees working remotely found it easier to concentrate on their work and were less likely to take sick days or long breaks.

This can be the reason why most of the big companies today have implemented working from home for the present as well as the future. Google, TCS, and IBM are examples of tech companies that have implemented this policy and leveraged their remote teams to boost productivity and enrich skills by working at home.

Managing the virtual workforce is all a tedious task to implement. Remote teams come up with lots of challenges like collaboration, task assignments, time management, on-time deliveries, and so on.

A successful virtual team is the one that adapts the new ways of interacting and collaborating things virtually. And to make them a successful one, managers play a pivotal role in remote working to:

• Help the virtual workforce work efficiently, and introduce them with all the latest remote tools.
• Give an extra bit of time to your team to explore and brainstorm ideas on how to make critical tasks easier with the use of new tools and technologies.
• Assign tasks with due dates regularly on remote tools like Teams or Basecamp that help them work in a streamlined process with on-time deliveries. It leverages the employee’s productivity and also maintains a home office regularity.
• Use video calls with team members most of the time. It will help to stay more connected and engaged.
• Be more creative than ever with your remote teams to boost productivity and improve interpersonal skills at all times.

Tips for managing virtual teams

1. Focus on how team members are collaborating and interacting with each other when performing tasks
2. Help them learn to adapt new automation tools that ease their work with fast delivery and high-performance
3. Help them with interactive sessions to ideate and brainstorm on new ideas
4. Provide your team members a flexible and friendly environment to interact with each other and come up with the challenges they are facing during remote working
5. Make virtual teams realize that the remote working environment opens up a world of new possibilities and opportunities for them to explore
6. Initiate video conferencing and spend a few minutes at the beginning of the meetings to ask some personal questions, such as “How do you feel working at home?”

The world is demanding new ways of working. The pandemic is challenging startups, big businesses, and managers to rethink business models, strategies, and the way they manage their workforce. How we work and where we work is being reimagined now. COVID19 led companies to rapidly transition the physical workforce to virtual teams overnight.

The COVID-19 outbreak has necessitated an abrupt shift in how managers manage business workflow and remote teams. Remote working brings greater engagement, to how managers communicate and interact in a meaningful way.

Key rule: As the digital space is moving fast right now, managers have to be proactive every time to change the direction and connect with our remote teams.

“Managing a virtual team needs managers to double down on the fundamentals of good management, including establishing clear goals, running great meetings, communicating clearly, and leveraging team members’ individual and collective strengths,” says Julie Wilson, founder of the Institute for Future Learning and instructor at Harvard University.

Image Source: CNBC

Putting it all together

All in all, we can say, that the new transformed digital era offers huge opportunities for businesses. Not just to improve existing operations, but to unlock new ways of working and value channels. Transitioning from in-person work to virtual work is proving to be challenging.

Zoom meetings, Slack messaging and Team conferences are all contributing greatly to building a digital bridge between virtual teams.

Here are the most used remote work collaboration tools in 2020:

Image Source: Statista

Furthermore, we are stepping into a digital world where we create new business value by equipping people with intelligent technologies and reshaping our business models and strategies to realize the opportunities of the digital revolution.

Guest author: Tanya Kumari leads the Digital Marketing & Content for Classic Informatics, a global web development company. She is an avid reader, music lover and a technology enthusiast who likes to be up to date with all the latest advancements happening in the techno world. When she is not working on her latest article on tech dynamics, you can find her by the coffee machine, briefing co-workers on the perks of living a healthy lifestyle and how to achieve it.

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