As teams continue to work across regions, across offices, and from home, it is more important than ever that your team feels included and rewarded for their efforts. Many managers look at dispersed teams as a supervision problem. The reality is that there is unlikely any need for increased supervision when your employees feel included and are aligned with the goals of the organization.
It's easy to fall back on your technical or business skills as the most important thing that you can contribute to an organization. Your skills are an important part of your job, but your ability to meet organization skills like reliability, problem-solving, teamwork, and perseverance helps the organization grow as a whole. When hiring for remote workers make sure that you have evaluated new team members' ability to contribute to your organization's success as well as complete their individual deliverables.
Expecting team members to take on additional HR responsibilities on top of their deliverables to find times with other team members that they do not know, then independently organize a video chat using their preferred tool just isn't productive.
The current pandemic is changing the way we work. With most cities in North America implementing requirements for non-essential workers to stay at home, it has forced teams to attempt working from home