HR work’s difficulties get doubled when they have to manage remote and hybrid teams. They must manage a lot in each area, especially if employees live abroad. The greatest difficulty comes in managing tasks that have to be done in a certain amount of time but are being done in a different time zone by remote workers. Also, they have to keep in mind foreign employee laws, currency conversion for payroll, and keeping employees engaged with only a screen to keep them involved.
Even so, there’s no need to give up hope. You can manage a globally distributed team seamlessly as if they are working in the office, and it doesn’t take much to do so.
In today’s blog, we’ll talk about the details of HR for fully remote and hybrid teams.
- How to coordinate meetings, work, and projects across multiple time zones
- To gather all word data of individual employees into a single dashboard for proper evaluation
- How to track work activities of work from home and remote employees
- How to work maintaining rules and laws for remote employees who work from other countries
- How to keep employees engaged, especially those who are not connected
- How to work with multicultural teams and help each other to work together
Working with Team Members from Different Time Zones
Flexibility is loved by employees but not HR. It is a great challenge to organize a meeting time for team members who live in three different time zones. If the timing is suitable for one employee, it surely is not for the other. There is a solution to this. You can use tools that make a side-by-side comparison of good appointment times, showing exactly when it’s best to set up an online meeting for people in different time zones.
To strengthen collaboration between teams, you can use your usual mix of communication tools such as Slack, Google Drive, Trello, Zoom, etc.
Remote team management software is another great tool that helps remote workers coordinate their work. The software collects data and shows:
- What individual employees are doing during their working hours
- How long it takes them to finish a certain task or project
- Productivity bottlenecks and helps them to optimize their performance
Managing Employees with Different Contracts and Legal Situations
Some of your employees are on probation, others have full-time contracts, and others work as freelancers or independent contractors. Their pay could be by the hour, at a flat rate, per project, or every month.
To make things even more confusing, they may come from different countries, each of which has its own labor laws that can lead to all kinds of penalties.
To keep up with state-specific employment laws, you have to keep track of any changes to the law every day. There are several ways to do this:
Using Google Alerts is one of the oldest and easiest ways to stay updated. Just type in keywords related to the country and laws in question, and Google will send you related articles whenever they contain those keywords. To make sure you don’t miss anything, you can also hire a lawyer for regular advice.
Using remote employee monitoring software can also help you comply with labor laws in the U.S., Europe, and any other country where you or your employees work. It keeps track of attendance, working hours, breaks, and meeting hours required by law.
It’s important to know that in Europe, you have to use time tracking systems to prove you’re not making your employees work too much and not paying them enough. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) will fine companies up to 15,000 euros if they don’t follow the rules.
The software can help you do more than just keep track of your working hours.
- It tracks overall computer activity
- Lets you identify top performers
- Display reports in a graphical presentation for easier understanding
- Lets you generate reports for precise analysis
How Can You Watch Over Employees Who Work From Home?
To set up an employee tracking system, you will need to do the following:
- Tell your employees about the decision, so you can get their consent
- Let your employees know how you’re going to track, which software you are using, the importance of it, and how it is not going to hamper their privacy
- Let them have a well-documented note on this and have their written consent to avoid any future issue
How to Manage Multicultural Employees
One of the first ways HRs use to teach employees about sensitivity is through a proper training session. Let your employees know how your organization respects employees from all demographics and how the company reacts if anyone tries to cross the limits.
Create a Notion or Confluence document with detailed descriptions and suggestions of resources they can always refer back to. So, they can look at it whenever they want to ask a question or say something.
How Monitoring Software Can Automate HR Process
Remote employee monitoring is an AI-powered software that automates and simplifies many HR tasks. When implemented correctly, the software not only helps HR to gather crucial data about employee work activity, but also helps to establish mutual trust with remote employees. The software will let you gather all work data and store them in a single dashboard, thus reducing the manual work. With employee monitoring software, HR can easily know who started to work when, how long they worked, their attendance, their break patterns, hours they spend in meetings, and their overall performance.
The role of HR is a complex one, especially when they have to manage globally distributed employees. Having software like CloudDesk can help HR to better understand their team and perform efficiently.
