Moreover, approximately 70% of those surveyed say coming into the office regularly is unnecessary. Staggering numbers by any measure and certainly a wake-up call for employers, but not completely surprising in our opinion.

The ubiquity of mobile devices, social media, and technology innovations has rendered “daily office visits” unnecessary and arguably unproductive. Carve off commute times and gas expenses, and you’ve got an even stronger case for giving the students what they want.

The right to work remotely, according to the students and young professionals surveyed, is not a sign of laziness or a lack of motivation, but rather a byproduct of an evolving society.

25% of the respondents surveyed even indicated they thought working from home would make them more productive. The new, modern work paradigm places more emphasis on the quality and timeliness of the work rather than on where it occurred.

Of course, that’s where tools like HiveDesk come in — allowing employers to track work sessions and productivity levels of young professionals working remotely, helping ensure they stay focused and on task.

The right to work remotely? Maybe the students are on to something…

Here’s what a few of our customers have to say about using HiveDesk to manage their virtual team of remote workers:

I just wanted to say I love the new “email time sheet” feature (and this program in general). Thanks!.
Michelle Day – http://passiveincomeonlineblog.com

I am really digging @hivedesk – makes tracking remote teams easy. Desktop screen capture,
time sheets & more!
Lorna Li – @lornali

HiveDesk has many, many benefits for those looking to outsource some of their online business
work and want to make sure they’re getting what they pay for.
ReplaceYourSalary.com

And, here’s what the press has to say about using HiveDesk to manage members of a virtual team:

In the beginning, it may be helpful to closely monitor the work of a new hire. Chris recommends
using tools like Hive Desk, which “allows you to keep a tab on what people are doing.
They have to clock in and out, just like they would in a regular office environment, and it takes
screenshots of their computer every ten minutes,” which can give you a bit more confidence
from the start.
GigaOM.com

We look forward to helping you better manage your virtual team!

Source: Techcrunch

With all of these e-mail accounts and all of the electronic communication that occurs, it’s more important than ever to monitor the tone in your virtual team emails.

Someone working remotely doesn’t know that you are answering the phone while sending an e-mail.  The recipient only knows that they got an answer that was a little terse and it might get interpreted as angry in tone.  With the typical corporate e-mail user getting 110 e-mails per day, chances are that more than one come in with the wrong tone to it.

Effective virtual team emails will  help you set the tone for your e-mails when body language or voice tone aren’t an option for communicating your message with remote workers. Here are some tips:

1.  If you think that something you’ve written might be taken the wrong way – add “LOL” (for laugh out loud) or an emoticon (think to let the recipient know that you are kidding.

2.  Run  ToneCheck software on your e-mails to see if words or phrases that you are using are giving off a negative tone.

3.  Remember that e-mails are easily forwarded and you never know who could end up with an e-mail you wrote that might be embarrassing or trouble for you later on.

4.  Call someone or set up a Skype meeting with them to communicate about something you’re having trouble with.

5.  Check your spelling so that you’re not sending the wrong message by sending it too quickly.

E-mail is a fact of life for today’s remote worker.  A little thinking before you hit the “Send” key, can keep you looking professional and save you a lot of miscommunications in your virtual team emails.

By surveying more than 4,500 U.S. information workers, they learned half of the companies surveyed have formal remote workers or a telework policy.

Ron Markezich, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s U.S. Enterprise and Partner Group said that “telework is no longer a company perk for employees but a business imperative.”

Markezich went on to say that “a host of benefits are now widely acknowledged to be good reasons to adopt telework initiatives and supporting technologies. Employers can tap into a larger talent pool, improve productivity, increase employee diversity and lower overhead costs.”  And remote workers can have “a more flexible work-life balance and reduce the stress of long commutes.”

Here’s an executive summary of the survey results of what remote workers said:

No matter what size an organization is, everyone can benefit from working remotely.

Having a policy in place and getting technology like HiveDesk in place makes it easy for remote workers to work more efficiently.

As you can see in the graphic below and in the HiveDesk Pricing & Sign Up area, we offer four plans to help you manage your remote team.

And, there’s a fifth option of getting a customized plan which doesn’t appear on our option table that some customers like a lot.

We like to recommend that if you’re just getting starting using HiveDesk to manage your remote team, that you use the “Small Plan.”  Like all of the HiveDesk plans, after you sign up you plan just $3 for the first three months no matter how many projects, hours, screenshots, or remote workers you have.  But, for people just beginning, the Small Plan is a nice way to use HiveDesk with up to 5 members of a virtual team to begin monitoring their progress.  Your remote workers will start by downloading the HiveDesk software and getting it running on their computers.  Next, they begin to use HiveDesk to  log in and out when they are working on your projects. And, they’ll learn how to delete screen captures that are taken at the intervals set up by you when they have good reason too.

Our customers who try the Small Plan are fine with the $35 monthly charge after the Trial Period ends.  And, they find that they may not need to see all of the screen shots taken over time, they want to keep them as a record of the project.  Once, the initial team of five remote workers is using HiveDesk, it’s easy to scale up as the project demands a larger virtual team.

Manage your remote team at your own pace. The remote workers really learn to appreciate the automated time sheets generated in PDF form that can help them keep track of hours worked so that they can get paid sooner.

A shorter answer to the question “Which HiveDesk plan do I need to manage my remote workers?” could have been “It depends on how many remote workers you have working on your project.”  But, that answer wouldn’t have taken into account the way that HiveDesk workers typically get started using HiveDesk to empower their virtual teams to be more efficient. While there are different ways to manage your remote team effectively, it’s important to remember building trust is the foundation of these efforts.

Manage your remote team more intelligently using HiveDesk and start seeing the benefits immediately.

With the introduction of laptops, smart phones, and WIFI, we’re certainly “always on” so it makes sense that we’re already working remotely.  (And, we’re probably working more than the 40 hours a week we originally signed up for.)

This trend influences so much of how work is done today.  Managers need to be taught how to manage remote workers effectively.  And, Facilities can rethink  how much office space to lease and how to lay out the space.  Equally important is how organizations need to think about the policies for their remote workers.  Remote workers the right equipment to keep them productive because they’re no longer located in your office all day every day.

Take a look at this video from Jason Fried of 37 Signals about “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work” and listen to his suggestions about how to empower your workers to communicate and collaborate when they’re working remotely.

With the majority of workers are working remotely, doesn’t it make sense to make a virtual team as effective as possible?  Lifting the limits of having everyone work together in the same office is a great way expand your organization’s knowledge base.  That’s where HiveDesk comes in!

Inventing new and productive ways of working remotely is in everyone’s best interest, because the trend is here to stay.

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’ve got an idea of what it’s like to manage remote workers. And you likely have an understanding of the importance of motivating remote workers.

It doesn’t matter if your workers are at home or on the other side of the world, you need to keep motivating remote workers so that they are as productive as possible.  Even your most self-sufficient remote employees can use a little extra help from you to stay on track.

Here are some tips for motivating remote workers:

1.  Keep your virtual team together – when you send out team e-mails and your run your regular team conference calls, make sure that all of your remote workers as well as your on-site workers are included.  If you create t-shirts or mugs with your logo on them, make sure that they are distributed to the whole team.  Put your remote workers on your organizational chart so that they can see how they fit into your team.

2.  Make sure to reward remote workers – if you’ve got something like an “employee of the month” award or a quarterly recognition award, make sure that one of your remote workers has the chance to win it every once in a while.  This also goes for bonuses.  Nothing is more demotivating for a worker than to be left out of the reward program because they don’t have the chance to champion themselves in the office every day.

3.  Encourage a “buddy program” between on-site and remote workers – when new projects open up, make sure to put both in-house workers and remote workers on teams together.  This is how office friendships get built.  It also encourages better communication between your employees as they set up concalls, e-mail lists, and action items for each other.

4.  Make sure remote workers have the equipment they need – when your remote workers have what they need to get the job done, they have a better chance of getting it done for you.  With the right technology and with the lines of communication to you open, you’re going to see greater productivity from everyone.

5. Get your remote workers paid on time – Use HiveDesk software to log work sessions and to track the time remote workers are spending on your projects.  Review work sessions on a regular basis and use the automatically generated time sheets to pay your workers on time.  Nothing is more demotivating to a worker than not to get paid on time for the work that they have completed.

Connect your remote workers to your goals and make them feel like part of your whole team. Motivating remote workers shouldn’t be a burden, but rather a team building tactic.

It’s not hard to keep motivating remote workers to ensure they remain happy and productive.  And, that’s important to your bottom line.

This HiveDesk article highlights some great ways to improve remote worker communication.

1.  E-mail – this is probably going to be your primary method for remote worker communication because it allows for long or short messages.  E-mail also makes it easy to send file attachments such as documents, spreadsheets, images, or screen shots.  As long as everyone on the team has an e-mail address, it doesn’t matter which system they use (i.e., Gmail, Yahoo, Exchange, etc.)  Unlike chat or conference calls, you don’t have to be there to receive e-mail.

2.  Instant Messaging  (IM) – allows you to communicate directly with two or more people using a shared client like AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or Apple’s FaceTime video chat. Even Facebook chat and SMS text messages could fall under the category of chat if you think about it.  IM’s are a great way to reach out to someone quickly to see if they are online when you need a question answered.  You can also use IMs to set up a call with your virtual team.

3.  Video Conferencing - using audio and video telecommunications, you can bring your remote workers together for an online  meeting.  Besides the opportunity to have team mates see each other as they are talking to each other, you can also share documents, computer screens, and whiteboards.  Some of the more popular videoconferencing platforms are Skype For Business and GotoMeeting.  It’s often helpful to set up a weekly video call with the virtual team just to touch base and share information.

4.  Project Management Software – the best way to enhance remote worker communication is with a collaborative platform like BaseCamp.  This software offers to-do lists, wiki-style web-based text documents, milestone management, file sharing, time tracking, and a messaging system.  It’s a great way to keep a virtual team on the same page.

5.  Telephone – let’s not forget the phone.  If you are in the middle of a project and you have a question, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone.  Not only will you get your question answered so that you can move on, you’ll also start building a relationship with your remote manager or virtual team mate.

The Internet makes remote worker communication easy and inexpensive. Any sized virtual team can take advantage of these ideas to keep projects running efficiently.

Remember, effective remote worker communication is key to the success of your project.

When the team is not working in the same office, you can’t just walk down the hall and look at the work that your remote workers are doing.  With HiveDesk software, it’s easy to boost remote workforce efficiency, optimize productivity and get your virtual team paid on time for all of their hard work.

Here’s how you can use HiveDesk to drive remote workforce efficiency:

• You create a project – which can be a single task for a single worker or a larger project for a virtual team
• You notify your remote workers -remote workers are automatically notified via email that they have a new project assigned to them.
• Work sessions begin – your remote workers download the HiveDesk desktop client and login to accept the project.

Your remote workers can check-in and check-out throughout while they are working on your project.  They can easily switch projects and HiveDesk tracks how much time they spend on each project.

Screenshots are taken randomly throughout a work session and  HiveDesk reports productivity data each time a screenshot is captured allowing you to monitor the efficiency of each work sessions.  This way, you can perform random audits to check the work that is being done.  This not only ensures that your remote are on task, but it allows you to spot any errors and make corrections right away.

At the end of the week (or when ever you like), you can export the work session history for each remote worker on your virtual team and generate time sheets so that your remote workers are paid on time for all of the work that they are doing for you.

Visit HiveDesk to learn how you can leverage our solution to drive remote workforce efficiency for your team!

This means that in order to grow, more businesses are looking at outsourcing to remote workers in order to save money.

And, they’ll need to use the tech tools – like HiveDesk – to manage their remote workers more effectively.

The article goes on to quote Danny Sullivan, of Agents of Value, an IT outsourcing company working with virtual assistants in the Philippines.  He says “smart people all over the world are a valuable asset for American companies.”  When everyone is trying to get  as much done with as small a budget as possible, access to a global workforce helps make that possible.  And, when Sullivan can pay $500 a month for a software engineer in the Philippines vs. paying an American engineer from a six-figure salary, the math builds the business case.

Outsourcing to remote workers is happening primarily for three different business activities.

According to Agents of Value (see their chart above), 41% of outsourcing to remote workers is software development and updating.  If you have a manager in your organization who can outsource work to a virtual assistants, can project manage, and will ensure that work is getting done right, then outsource it.  Doesn’t make sense to have less expensive workers doing tasks that you don’t need your expensive workers spending their time on?

As businesses of all sizes look to grow in today’s economic climate, outsourcing to remote workers makes good financial sense.

Leveraging a virtual team of remote workers is a benefit to everyone involved.  And, software like HiveDesk lets you grow your business without micro-managing your remote team.