5 Challenges to Remote Work and How to Overcome Them

Remote workplaces have happier and more engaged employees because of a better work-life balance, which in turn boosts productivity and improves the gains from collaboration. Remote work as a long-term strategy also promotes diversity and inclusion and increases cost savings by way of reducing the need for more infrastructure, the office commute, and other costs.

Given all these benefits, it is no surprise that employers are considering remote work or should seriously consider remote work as a long-term strategy for business growth. But every strategy requires care in execution, and it is here that things might not come together as expected. While remote work becoming a long-term strategy is any HR team and organization management’s dream come true, there are barriers to its implementation.

We will start with Henry Ford’s famous quote, “Obstacles are the scary things you see when you take your eyes off the goal”, to encourage you to look beyond these barriers and focus on your goal. We will be breaking these barriers down, at management and employee levels, one by one in this article as you move towards remote work as a long-term strategy.

5 Challenges of Remote Work and How to Overcome Them

1. Issues in People Management

Remote work can be particularly difficult for managers. Studies have shown that organizations that adapted best to the pandemic were those where the management practices were better. An example of this is avoiding micromanagement of inputs instead of focusing on objectives. Technology is available, but let’s make the right use of it and trust the employees more than before.

Having periodic instances of work from the office, that is a hybrid work arrangement rather than a fully remote work arrangement could also be more beneficial and not only help bolster the social cohesion among the employees but improve communication also. It is also important to train managers in how to provide constructive feedback and manage poorly performing employees in a better manner, congenial for everyone involved and the business.

2. Lack of Support Systems

Working from anywhere routine enables a restoration of work-life balance and support may naturally be available at home. But this is not true all the time. For instance, it is important to protect the interests of working mothers. Research showed that during the pandemic, when remote work was first introduced, working mothers were more stressed at work and inclined to leave office sooner or avoid work altogether as compared to men.

Though in the years after the pandemic, this ought to have changed, let us give time to focus on the mental health needs of working mothers and create special employee resource groups that provide help and support to them. Provide them with stipends for healthy work breaks and encourage them to visit a counselor or wellness advisor outside of office hours if necessary.

3. Assuring Employee Well-Being

The conditions in a workplace, especially those in manufacturing and research facilities, need to be safe for the workers. Many of these workplace conditions are monitored onsite. Moving such monitoring offsite or ensuring these conditions remotely or ensuring they are maintained using AI may or may not be trustworthy. Of course, safety is not the only concern.

Even in industries like IT, which support remote work fully, there is risk of social isolation and resulting behaviors developing in the employees. Again, special employee resource groups must be established to reduce the incidence of negative events. Check in frequently with employees through video conferencing and include a wellness expert, if necessary, on the call. Build an online community where people in the company trust each other. Fostering a sense of connection and guaranteeing a better work-life balance is also crucial.

4. Lack of Technology

The employees who are working from home will need access to systems fully set up for work from home with fully supported cloud-based technology and secure access, uninterrupted power supply capability, and a reliable internet connection. An organization may not be able to provide all this immediately to the employees. The office may also not have sufficient attendance and work tracking software installed on the laptops and a team to handle the IT issues reported by the employees.

They may even lack the necessary money to provide for the employees, encouraging them to acquire the resources necessary to work from home in a reliable and honest manner. These are some debilitating issues, not necessarily with a solution. These problems can be overcome only if the organization starts to invest in technology continuously, even attempting to build an IT team and support hotline numbers in-house as early as possible. Outsourcing IT is an option if the money is there or made available.

5. Leadership Resistance

Last, but not least, the difficulty of a barrier to overcome, leadership resistance can also be a difficult thing to manage. Some leaders may have objections to the remote work policy, especially when it is mandated for their teams, and they are not ready for it. This will not only impact the future of your business but if you disagree outright in your bid to go remote, you may lose great leaders in your organization, some of them even irreplaceable.

To solve this problem, you need to train leaders in changing management and how to manage remote teams. You can also have a pilot program where you invite a renowned speaker to convince senior executives and management of the effectiveness of remote teams. Last, you can also secure buy-in from your senior leaders on introducing remote work for a month. Your business can then adopt performance metrics that demonstrate the change in productivity before and after the adoption of remote work. If performance improvement is substantial, you can use this to convince your leadership that remote work is indeed the future.

Closing Words

The greatest barrier to remote work unfortunately is none of these listed. Those really are the ‘will change, to transform your business, to take that bold step’. And these comes to a business when the leadership has great vision and the business itself upholds the ideals that drive it forward. In the absence of this, remote work could just be another fiasco you walked into. What are the challenges your company faced when you went 100% remote? Let us know in the comments below.