Nowadays, modern businesses manage operations outside the office with remote and hybrid work. While companies like ours are the first to argue remote work is a net positive, there’s no denying the existence of remote work challenges for companies.

Remote work may offer flexibility and convenience, but ensuring those are advantages and not liabilities will require specific action and focus. There’s an array of issues remote and hybrid companies battle like: 

  • Collaboration
  • Productivity
  • Project Management
  • Security

Whether you’re a business owner or a manager, it’s essential to navigate these challenges and create a thriving work environment that fosters growth, productivity, and positive communication.

In this post, we’ll discuss nine challenges of working remotely and how to overcome these common remote work pitfalls.

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1. Remote team collaboration and communication

Collaboration and communication are the first remote work challenges that come to mind — and for good reason. With limited face-to-face interaction, it takes more work to establish healthy, productive relationships with colleagues.

Remote businesses will need to work extra hard in areas like onboarding. While new hires in an in-office setting are surrounded by plenty of resources to build relationships, learn new skills, and manage their mental health, remote teams will need to work extra hard here to create a culture of psychological safety.

Beyond onboarding, day-to-day communication can be challenging for even the longest-tenured team members. To overcome the challenge of working outside a traditional work environment, remote teams can incorporate virtual meetings, conference calls, team-building activities, and knowledge management systems to simplify the communications needed to collaborate.

It’s difficult to force people to brainstorm or work through things together. Instead, start by removing the barriers to collaboration. When you remove the challenges, your remote team will be more comfortable working together. 

Once you address communication gaps, you might even learn to master asynchronous work and have extended coverage working across multiple time zones. 


2. Productivity 

If you’ve followed the evolution of remote work, there’s always been skeptics that claim remote workers aren’t as productive

The truth is distractions, lack of supervision, and time management challenges make maintaining productivity a daunting task for remote managers. But, with the right tools in place, remote work has considerable benefits like: 

  • Savings on office and co-working spaces
  • Increased talent pools
  • 24/7 coverage
  • Improved retention 

With employee productivity monitoring software, remote managers gain peace of mind through features like: 

  • Idle timeout settings
  • Activity tracking
  • App and URL usage
  • Screenshots
  • Meeting time
  • Utilization rates

Even with the right tools, moving from pure hours to projects and goals is crucial. Successful remote workers prioritize accomplishing goals. This is better measured and attained by evaluating people based on task completion — not just how long they’ve been at their computers.

Adopting goals and KPIs driven by outcomes encourages people to be more productive while avoiding false metrics and measurements that can lead to frustration or disengagement.

3. Creating an inclusive culture

One of the biggest perks of remote work is the ability to widen the talent pool to a global scale. In doing so, you’ll have a diverse workforce of different cultures, genders, religious beliefs, etc. 

Sounds perfect, right? Well, you’re only halfway there. 

A diverse team benefits your business, as they are over 35% more productive and 2.5 times more profitable. But how does it benefit each team member? 

Diversity and inclusion are not always directly correlated. While it’s arguably easier for remote businesses to create diverse teams, it’s arguably harder to sustain them without face-to-face interactions. 

Without proper DEI efforts, the diverse culture you’ve worked hard to build can begin to crumble. In fact, 39% of employees have opted out of jobs due to concerns about inclusion efforts. You can use a number of strategies like: 

  • Prioritizing diversity training. Consider ongoing cultural sensitivity and diversity training to help your team members learn and set expectations.
  • Plan virtual events. Simulate in-person team building with virtual retreats, coffee chats, happy hours, and more to help teams feel comfortable with one another, learn each other’s motivations, and understand their background.
     
  • Start with onboarding. There’s no time to waste when it comes to making team members feel valued and included. At Hubstaff, our onboarding starts with small meetings across departments where new team members get a chance to meet teammates from around the globe and learn about their teammates’ personal lives, job roles, and more.
  • Create a policy. Everyone benefits from following a few guidelines and continuing education about different cultures and traditions because we all want a more enjoyable work environment.

4. Balancing work and personal life

Balancing personal and professional life is another challenge of managing remote employees.

Remote team members are at risk of working longer hours and having less structure to their breaks, which can lead to burnout. The difficulty for employers is that you need to tackle work and home habits.

Companies should encourage employees to establish work boundaries and ensure a healthy work-life balance. This means actively monitoring hours so your team isn’t letting work bleed into personal time. You can use tools like Hubstaff to set breaks and limits.

Leaders should also think about training team members to create boundaries. Support your people by allowing them to step away when needed. That means encouraging them to use benefits or pause time without consequence for things like doctor appointments or picking the kids up from school.

Thankfully, many remote work challenges for managers can be addressed by leading by example. There are even small things like encouraging people to work in a space separate from where they spend their downtime so that there’s less of a compulsive feeling to need to check email while watching some TV or reading a book.

For a more detailed dive, check out these tips for improving the work-life balance for your team members and crew.

5. Overworking and stress

Overworking is rampant in remote work settings. The lack of separation between work and home life can make it challenging to disconnect from work. To overcome this challenge, companies should set fair and reasonable deadlines.

Again, we want to return to the idea that companies benefit by shifting goals away from hourly tasks and toward outcomes.

625 million people suffer from depression and anxiety at work. It costs companies $1 trillion per year. - EveryoneSocial


You should still track hours for payment purposes. However, people’s work should be judged by accomplishments instead of pure productivity metrics focusing on clicks or keyboard activity. Instead, use those activity elements to verify work activity and spot trends to help your team reach new heights.

Burnout is a significant threat and can be challenging to spot — especially for managers new to leadership or new to remote. Here are a few burnout signs to watch out for and some tips on addressing them specifically.

6. Project and task management 

Managing remote project teams can be a challenging task. When choosing project management software, companies should select tools that are intuitive and easy for everyone to use. This helps ensure that everyone is working towards the set goal and clears any misunderstandings that may arise.

Hubstaff Tasks

Your aim is to set expectations and avoid failures. When possible, stick to a single project management tool across your organization. That way, you can pay for training for leads and set company-wide policies for projects and tasks. These project management tools make it easy for managers to report to leadership about successes and growth, giving everyone credit for their hard work.

7. Career growth

The lack of career growth or advancement opportunities can be discouraging for employees. Remote companies should offer:

  • Continuous training programs
  • Career advancement programs
  • Leadership roles
  • Employee engagement survey
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) groups
  • Promotions
  • Opportunities for employee-led feedback

Employees often stay where they are until something forces them to leave. This workplace inertia concept has been detailed and confirmed for decades. Leaders and managers must identify what would cause someone to leave. In many cases, that is a lack of opportunity.

This reality is why career growth and smart retention strategies often go hand-in-hand.

If you’re struggling to understand what to offer, look at how you (and your competitors) hire. Ask yourself:

  • What do you offer that people like?
  • Where does your business fall short? 
  • Why would someone choose you to start their career?
  • What steps will people want to take in their respective careers?

Building off of these questions helps ensure your organization understands career growth issues and the solutions you need to help your team grow.

8. Building and maintaining trust

Building and maintaining trust with virtual teams is essential to successful remote work. It’s also critical to solving most remote work challenges. Fail to build trust, and you’ll never be able to recover.

In remote work, trust comes in a few different forms:

  • Visibility. Trust starts with visibility. While that covers simply being available on Slack and other communication and collaboration tools, visibility also means leading by example. For instance, leaders can create a company culture where they take PTO to help team members feel like it’s okay to prioritize work-life balance as well.
  • Transparency. For the metrics we’ve mentioned, trust comes from transparency — especially in evaluating teams. Allow teams to provide feedback and celebrate their successes so they feel invested in their performance.
  • Communication. Trust requires ongoing communication, too. Companies should support multiple communication channels, establish regular video meetings, conduct team-building sessions, and provide opportunities for each remote worker to get to know one another beforehand.

Trust is a core part of everything else on this list because successful remote work inherently means trusting people to do their jobs without looking over their shoulders at all times.

If you’re struggling with the trust aspect of remote work, check out our tips on how you can avoid micromanagement while still ensuring the work is getting done.

9. Time zone differences

Speaking of times, another remote work challenge for companies to consider is physical location and time. This seems simple but can be one of the trickiest remote work challenges for managers.

Time zone differences are a significant issue when working with international teams. Remote work can complicate this because you’ll juggle more time zones, sometimes even if people are in the same state or country.

Companies should establish set hours of work that overlap, offering flexibility and rotating shifts. That can help you address support-focused remote working challenges and solutions.

If you support more asynchronous work, consider picking a company time zone and sharing that with team members. That way, it’s easier to schedule meetings that everyone can attend.

Thankfully, many tools like Google Calendar will convert meetings and due dates into local time. This allows a manager to set a single time, and then each individual knows when it will occur. Automated tools eliminate the risk of time zone conversion errors.

Remote work challenges for companies

Technical challenges are a significant hurdle in remote work. However, they’re also an excellent solution for many issues, like the automatic time zone conversion just mentioned.

When thinking about the challenges of working remotely and how to overcome them, look for common threads. Companies should use reliable communication and task management tools, offer tech support, and provide access to the required technology to complete their tasks.

Your remote organization needs a strong IT leader. Not only will they need to select and help troubleshoot proven tools, but they will also need to develop security practices that keep your distributed organization safe. They’re a linchpin to your success as you use technology to bridge the time and distance gaps mentioned above.

Whether you’re a business owner or a manager, it’s essential to navigate these challenges and create a thriving work environment that fosters growth, productivity, and positive team communication.

  • Communication
  • Productivity
  • Habits and cultural differences
  • Healthy work-life balance
  • Overworking and stress
  • Project and task management
  • Career growth
  • Building and maintaining trust
  • Time zone differences

What have you found to be your most common remote work challenges and the best solution? Share with us in the comments below.

Category: Remote