When the world began to recover from lockdowns, many companies were determined to bring their employees back to the office. For some corporations, such as Apple, this decision led to high levels of discontent among employees and even the loss of critical workers. New waves of the pandemic are forcing further adjustments to corporate plans. As a result, the date for returning to the completely in-house way of working continues to be pushed further and further into the future.
The majority of employees have already adapted to teleworking and many feel better working from home. With higher levels of employee satisfaction, well-organized remote work has the potential to improve business results. So how should businesses adjust their management tactics to handle this new reality in the long-term? Kaspersky executives share their insights and the proven tips they use to efficiently run multinational, remote and hybrid teams.
Evgeniya Naumova, Executive Vice President at Kaspersky, and the leader of a team of more than 670 employees, finds that online collaboration opened a new perspective for her department: “Despite all the challenges, my team managed to end the pandemic year on a positive note with better results than we had achieved in previous years,” comments Evgeniya. “Even after transitioning to remote work, the company still achieved double-digit growth in 2020 across several streams. In enterprise, which is the key business segment (and the most challenging), sales grew by 23% compared to pre-COVID levels.”
Sergey Soldatov, Head of Security Operations Center at Kaspersky, agrees that teleworking can yield new achievements rather than difficulties, when combined with well-established processes: “We have been continuously assessing the productivity of SOC our analysts and found that no matter what mode they work in, people’s efficiency in the roles continues to increase. Remote work was not a challenge for us, and it won’t be a problem for any company with mature processes. I am confident that remote work is a good test for process maturity and effectiveness.”
Here are field-proven tips from Kaspersky’s executives that can help managers increase the productivity of their remote teams:
- Hire self-motivated people that share your company’s values, enjoy their work and want their company to succeed. This promotes team-building and lets you trust your workers without following them with a stopwatch;
- Enable employees to focus on the areas where they exhibit the greatest efficiency and enthusiasm. Let employees express themselves and share tasks between different teams, so that team members understand and learn new processes;
- Avoid micromanagement. Trust people and the way they work best without being overly controlling. Work should be judged by measurable results, not by the hours spent on tasks
- Raise the maturity levels of business processes. Build metrics that allow you to assess the results of your team based on the value they contribute
- Even if your team works remotely, still try to periodically hold face-to-face meetings. Communication is challenging with remote work because people perceive between 50% and 80% (according to different sources) of information through non-verbal cues. In-person communication helps you and your teammates to get to know each other and can prevent potential communication problems
- Make use of all the advantages that the remote model has to offer and organize your time as effectively as possible. For example, if you cannot personally attend a virtual meeting, ask your colleagues to send you a recording so you can listen to it afterwards at a higher speed. This will save you time but also keep you well-informed
- Read relevant literature and study best practices because more information on the topic will enable you to make better decisions. Try books, such as “Remote: Office not required,” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen, or guidelines from companies that have been working under a fully remote model for a long time, such as Gitlab’s.