How To Effectively Scale Your Business and Remote Team

Running a successful business means more than just making a profit. If you want your company to reach its full potential, you need to think about growing and scaling from day one. It’s crucial to learn how to scale a business if you’re hoping to see long-term success.

Of course, while you’re scaling your business, you also need to think about how you will scale your team. Even though it can be a challenge to scale a business, especially if you’re working with a remote team, you won’t have any issues as long as you know how to approach this challenge.

How to scale a remote team

Thanks to technological advancements that have allowed employees to work from home, more and more companies are choosing to hire remote teams. The number of people who work remotely at least once per week has grown by 400% since 2010.

If you’re ready to trade in the traditional office culture for remote employees, you also need to know how to scale your team.

Implement a hiring process

If you want your business to grow, you can’t just outsource your work to anyone, you have to build a team of professionals that will take their jobs seriously.

There are some steps you need to take during your hiring process:

• Make a list of all positions you need to fill and what tasks each position entails.
• Create a job application that requires applicants to demonstrate their skills.
• Hold video interviews where you will discuss the expectations you have for your employees.
• Make a list of questions to ask applicants during the interview such as if they worked for a remote company before and what kind of previous working experience they have.

Prioritize good communication

One important aspect of remote work productivity is good communication. Since your team members all work from different locations, you need to find a way to be connected at all times. Fast and secure channels are essential so collaboration on projects can be done without any glitches.

Communicate all important information to your employees and encourage them to contact you whenever they have any questions or issues that need to be resolved.

Create an onboarding system

Every team member needs to understand the tasks they need to complete on a day-to-day basis and understand how your business operates. A good onboarding system will help all of your new employees realize what’s expected of them so they can get to work right away.

Allow flexible schedules

When you have a remote team, it’s hard to keep the classic 9-5 workday, especially if some of your employees are working from different time zones. Give your staff the freedom to manage their own time and accept that performance is much more important than attendance.

This way, you can significantly improve employee satisfaction, as studies have shown that many office workers don’t like the traditional type of schedule. In fact, 54% of them say they would leave their job for one that offers flexible work time, so don’t insist on a 9-5 workday unless it’s absolutely necessary.

As long as all the tasks are completed before the deadline, there’s no need to enforce a strict work schedule all employees have to abide by.

Create a good remote team culture

Your employees shouldn’t just be the people who are there to complete a task for you. They are all a part of a team, so you need to work on creating a team culture.

This phrase refers to the dynamic your team members have, and it includes your employee’s behaviors, beliefs, values, and attitudes. A good remote team culture helps employees collaborate better, support each other, and work hard toward accomplishing the company’s common goals.

How to scale your business

Scaling needs to come from you first, but it also comes from your team, so all of the company’s employees need to be invested in its growth. With that in mind, here is what you and your employees can do to scale your business.

Take your time

You’re probably eager to scale your business and grow rapidly, but keep in mind that expansion of business doesn’t necessarily lead to success. If you rush into some decisions and take action without thinking about the consequences, you’ll find out you took on more than you can handle.

Scaling a business is a long process that requires a lot of changes and new challenges, so it’s good to take it one step at a time.

Adapt your management style

If you never managed a remote team before, you’ll need to modify your management style and adapt to virtual work. Even though you’ll probably see the lack of person-to-person contact with your employees as a reason to tighten the reins, this kind of approach will only be counter-productive.

Don’t micromanage your team. Instead, develop a relationship with your employees that will show them they can trust you.

Invest in technology

Tools are an important part of any business, but especially for remote companies. In the beginning, you can use free collaborative tools that will allow you to communicate with team members.

However, as your business starts to scale, you will have to invest in more advanced software that will automate some processes.

Set expectations and document all processes

To grow a business properly, all team members need to know what’s expected of them, and that’s sometimes hard to do, even in an office. To make sure your remote team is doing everything that’s necessary to scale a business, you need to set proper expectations.

The best way to ensure every team member knows what assignment they need to accomplish is to document all processes. With processes that have clearly defined objectives, you will be able to provide employees with a structure they can follow and depend on.

Optimize all of your employee’s access permission

When a business scales, new and bigger projects often come up that require multiple people to participate. To make it easier to keep track of everyone’s progress and keep a remote team in sync, use a production platform that supports customer user permissions.

When necessary, allow access permission to all employees who are working on a shared project. This way, you will be able to maximize productivity, as all team members will keep up with each other.

Don’t be afraid to delegate

Business owners get accustomed to doing everything by themselves, which is normal while your business is still in the early stages. But as you start to scale your business, bring in more employees, and take on more customers, you will soon realize that it’s impossible to perform all the tasks you once did.

Decide important things such as whether you need to divide your company into multiple departments, who will be the head of each team, and how you’ll ensure everyone stays accountable to you.

Final thoughts

Scaling a business might seem harder with a remote team, but not having an office doesn’t mean you can’t grow your business into a successful corporation.

Quite the contrary, as long as you know how to effectively scale a remote business and your team, you will find that scaling is not only possible, it’s also easier than you probably thought. 

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