To train and retain personnel according to your brand is basic — but how do you attract or retain top flight remote professionals? Keeping them loyal is doubly harder because they compete in an open and highly flexible market. There are so many lures that make it hard to establish loyalty with these pros, and one of these is pricing competitiveness.
The things that affect regular employee behaviour are magnified in different ways in remote jobs:
- Paid leaves and employee perks – the workers in question look at the latter with some disdain, because they are workaholics who don’t want to be bothered by things like in office birthday parties. But you might want to be more generous with paid leaves and pay attention to individualised and performance-based perks.
- Promotion and advancement – these are mavericks who tend to look at traditional corporate hierarchies or settings as obsolete if not downright harmful. However, if they can advance by learning interesting things, this will be so much better for them. Mentoring and friendship are good ways of managing top talent.
- Work relevance – sometimes, those who are great workers in remote settings may not even pay attention to work relevance, if their considerable potential have been untapped or misused in past experiences.
- Mobility – this is seen as an advantage for talented digital nomads or freelancers, and a total disadvantage for those who want to keep these remote professionals. Also, you might want a home based or even office based worker rather than a nomad here. So you should stay firm on your preference.
- Freedom and initiative – these needs really sets them apart even as they just need working equipment not much beyond what regular employees have. Freedom here is mostly cerebral or initiatives-based and related to space/time, not behavioural in nature.
Today’s remote professionals are a breed apart, mostly those who caught their own personal trains into tech-based work. These have developed qualifications, work habits and valuable skills for working remotely. No two professionals like these share generic skill sets, because the technology platform supports so much variety and personalisation.
How to Hunt for Quality Remote Worker Candidates
A company searching for the best pro that fits its requirements must do some well-planned headhunting. The people they want will have certain standards for the best remote jobs influenced by location and tech. The creative quotient for such candidates is very high. In current markets, this quality appreciates in value over time and familiarity with a job, so retaining your candidate once you’ve found her is essential.
Other qualities you will be looking out for are experience: such a candidate is moulded over time and previous employment. Another is outstanding but a bit inconsistent work results: this simply means that the creative factor was at work (and mostly untapped by previous employers) and part of your job is to isolate this factor and find out how it works for your potential hire.
And yes, candidates like these do not grow on trees.
Engagement Will Be a Delicate Process
Wooing is the right term for any company who knows its stuff when it comes to the hiring of the high calibre professionals in question. Profiling for the needed qualities should be built into starting processes like online application forms. Your company should also relegate some time for adjustment.
Engagement should never stop after the ink dries on the contract. A few months into a job is where talent will usually think of doing engagement in the long term. An employee has every right to study the culture and company before deciding to really become part of them — and a talented one will certainly be aware and use such a right. It works just like how a company has the right to designate probationary status before regularisation.
Running a Remote Office for Regular Work and How This Works
Remote friendly companies are the most progressive in office amenities and work ethics. Turning your company into one of these is easy. Talented people are just like everybody else in this, only more. So that real remote jobs should be where they find room to breathe, think, enjoy and apply their creativity.
The office location is important. It should ideally be central to the area in which you hope to employ the talent you want. Location is everything in remote work — and despite what they tell you about working from coffee shops, a real office works better.
Talented folks also appreciate a good office atmosphere. The best ones may even prefer it to casual working places.
Knowing Your Pros Means Loving Them
Understanding, mitigation, support and care — all these are engagement features of an employer that loves its talent. So make good use of your adjustment period to really know the talent you hire. It will be appreciated by talent loving your company back. This, surprisingly, will not take too much, because often, work is its own reward.
You simply need to make the work that much more interesting, convenient and well supported by management, hardware, software and amenities. Make sure that all these will cut down on time, because efficiency in the working process is a built in habit for most talented remote employees. All these are part of the secret of their being successful, something many freelancers may not see at all.
The Outsourcing Industry: Key to the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Outsourcing is already an established form for scaling your business, and this is the industry that created parameters for remote or online work. It’s become key source for quality employees for the upcoming Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The smaller the company, the more it is able to leverage outsourced talent. Workers from outside any company locality, in and of themselves, are a resource for scaling. They provide windows of opportunity into wider markets, diverse creative resources, so much so that the best small to medium tech startups often work remotely with talent from all over the world.
Another way of making outsourcing successful is through regional partnership. Take two countries: one is where there is an excess of capital and another where topnotch talent is underemployed. Such a situation exists between Australia and the Philippines. In work, anchoring is important and a traveler’s perspective will definitely waste time and effort in terms of productivity.
A solid connection between diverse locations is the cornerstone of successful outsourcing. Your remote professionals, candidates or hired personnel, will know their roles here, and make diverse contributions that further add to your business resources.