International Remote Workers: Benefits and Challenges

If you’ve been working from home, you might feel like all of the days are running together, and you don’t have a good handle on time anymore.

Here’s a question for you: When’s the last time you took time off work?Taking a break to unplug and recharge can give us the strength and resilience we need to manage all that we have.Taking time off to focus on something more creative or physical, for example, can give you a sense of work-life balance.It’s not enough to just take time off, you want to make sure your time off is truly refreshing.

Try these tips to help you get as much as you can out of your vacation—even if you’re not going anywhere.- Make sure you take the amount of time you need.

If you don’t feel like you fully wind down from your job on the weekends, then taking two or three days off might not be long enough to rejuvenate you.- Before your vacation, look at the work that’ll need to be done while you’re gone.

Can any of it be done ahead of time?

If so, do it—but slowly so as not to overwhelm yourself.- Set an out-of-office message for your email so people know they shouldn’t expect to hear from you.

Are you searching for Team Building Activities?

Checkout these Virtual Team Building Activities For WFH Teams you can do with your remote employees for some good team bonding.

It wasn’t until the pandemic that it went from optional to a necessity, and it’s sped up digital transformations in a drastic way.Rapidly employers had to consider evolution as far as their IT infrastructure, how employees could access the resources they needed to do their jobs, even when working from unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and how to create policies conducive to this new way of doing business.Employers and IT teams have lost much of their centralized visibility to see what’s happening on their network.

Employees are laxer about cybersecurity when they’re working from home.There’s also often a lack of clarity on remote work because there aren’t well-defined policies in place.With all of this in mind, the following is a guide to what businesses should know about transitioning to a more permanent version of remote work, or at least a hybrid environment.An Overview of Remote WorkNow that we’re significantly into the pandemic, both limitations and benefits of employees working remotely has become much clearer.

That could mean, if practice followed the estimation, that three to four times as many people would be working from home than they were before the pandemic.As was touched on above, there are challenges, including not just the technical considerations but also how to coach employees, ensure there’s recognition and maintain a cultural connection to the company.Specific business considerations stemming from remote work include:Fraud—there’s the potential for fraud to become a more significant risk when employees work from home.

You want to make sure that leadership is regularly communicating with them, sharing goals, and reinforcing your corporate vision.

Employees may not know how to work securely when they’re remote, or they may be less vigilant when they’re not in the office environment.

It’s also hard for employees to discern what’s a phishing scam because they’re highly sophisticated in many cases.Passwords: Even when you’re utilizing VPNs, firewalls, and more traditional means of securing your network, if employees have weak passwords or reuse them, you’re at risk.

Some of these changes are temporary and may be reversed after the .ness operations is the shift to remote working.

In a study conducted by research firm Gallup, 74 % of businesses surveyed had conveyed their decision to continue with the remote working arrangement even after the pandemic situation eases out.

Facebook CEO has announced that the company has asked 50 % of its employees to work from home for the next 5 to 10 years.

In a survey conducted by Willis Tower Watson, a renowned British advisory company about the impact of Covid-19 & WFH on employee productivity among global companies, 22% of the companies surveyed reported that there was no impact or a positive change in employee productivity while 15 % of respondents admitted that they are facing a negative impact.

Here are some points of action to help managers deliver the same or better levels of performance when handling a remote working team1.

Make sure that all your internal communications are tailored to those needs so that your employees find them relevant and engaging.

The employees do not have to go through the turmoil of a soul-crushing commute of long hours; they need not tackle the traffic quagmire and a lot more.

Moreover, the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic has compelled businesses worldwide to go beyond their office buildings' walls as we see people working remotely more than they have ever before.Researches also back the benefits employees can have if they are working from home or a remote location.

Employees working remotely are wealthier, healthier, and have an improved work-life balance than the employees who go to the office.

Employees find it difficult to adjust to customized work locations, which can have an ill effect on their overall productivity as well.

In addition to his, business organizations expect the employees to put in the extra hours, which means more workload and effort from the worker's side.In this article, we will look at the issues of remote working with solutions so that your productivity and efficiency cease to recede.To better understand the problems, we can broadly divide the issues related to remote working into two categories.Challenges faced by business  organizations (team) Challenges faced by employees  (individual worker) Challenges of remote working for employersThe ongoing pandemic has forced business organizations to make haphazard changes in their work methods, and adjusting to these forced changes was tough.

It is easier when people belonging to different teams are in the same office as it would be easier for them to interact with each other during product development.

The fear of COVID-19 and attempts to try and slow down its spread across the globe has led to a situation where a lot of businesses shut down their operations and attempt with the telecommute working model.

Of course, there are a lot of businesses that had practised this model for years (and with a great success rate), nonetheless, for a lot of employees, entrepreneurs and organizations this is a brand new concept.

So, the big question is – after their employees can return to the office, is there really a need for such a thing?

A smaller on-spot staff means that you can get by with a smaller office, that you have to pay fewer commute benefits and avoid a lot of unnecessary expenses.

In other words, the existing structure of business work may forever change.Online businesses are boomingWhile it may seem like the industry is in shambles (or will be very soon), the truth is that online streaming services, apps and e-commerce are probably doing better than ever before.

Keep in mind, nonetheless, that while these businesses exist online, they are usually focused on the local market in order to offer quick deliveries.

Last year, the covid-19 pandemic resulted in many Australian business owners finding effective ways to manage their businesses and staff work remotely.

As a result, many started looking for cost-effective ways to streamline business work operations.

As the demand started rising, many technological advances, including VoIP, came to support remote work systems and make the business operation less stressful and expensive.

Voice over internet protocol or VoIP is one such technology that enables the user to make online phone calls.

Here is how VoIP helps remote workers.

In addition, a cloud-based business phone system lets them eliminate the use of additional hardware and traditional phones by providing unified communications tools.