Connects are a valuable service The IMF provides for its members. When they have an issue they come to us and we arrange a web conference with other members who are in the same boat or can provide valuable insight into that particular situation. In one of our recent connects, an IMF member company was in the early stages of transitioning to a remote workforce and looking for help. They were looking to move some of their home office employees to remote status. A report is now available for that Connect discussion and below is a brief outtake from it which talks about changing your mindset in terms of managing remote workers:

“We have done a lot of outsourcing and I’ll define outsourcing as utilizing a low cost alternative to in-house staff. That could mean taking on off-shore, near-shore, and U.S. third party partners. This also includes converting employees into a temp status while working remotely. The one thing we learned, sort of the hard way, is that it was easy to set up and define how to manage a third party resource. We tried to manage or maintain a relationship with the remote work-from-home type of employees as if they were simply working in another office of ours. However, this approach did not become effective for us or reduce any of the frustrations associated with that type of relationship until we actually looked at them as if they were a remote third party resource. That may sound a little confusing but what I mean is when we went to third party partners, instead of managing the people, we managed the process. We figured out what the process was and what was important for us in that process. Focus on what part made it an effective resource, what part ensured quality, and what particular metric(s) defined success. These tended to vary on each process. You had to spend a lot of time working with the business to identify what metrics they could look at that would actually say this was running well and define future improvement…”

Members can download the full report HERE. In that report you will read about how different companies determine potential benefits to their customers and define the success of their remote workforce. Learn about working with the business side to determine proper metrics and the benefits of using third party resources to handle your work-from-home employees. Some of the other issues approached in the report include training your leadership and using a “manage the process, not the people” method for your remote workers.