Changed behavior when working virtually
Corona has brought some moving changes to our everyday and working lives. However, some of these changes can still be positive as they address issues such as mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. It is expected that more employees will continue to partially work from home after the reopening. Hopefully, companies will continue to expand their employees' skills, bonuses and benefits after the crisis, under virtual circumstances.
As this unstructured virtual work becomes more prevalent, it becomes more important to determine what factors are needed to recruit employees to succeed in a virtual work environment and how to prepare them to work virtually.
Behavioral skills: What success looks like for the individual virtual employee.
The four key behavioral skills that indicate successful recruitment for virtual work and ultimately lead to results, including efficiency and satisfaction:
- Developing trust
- Coordination of information
- Use of media
- Establishing behavioral guidelines
These skills need to be distinguished as they can be interrelated.
Developing trust. In a successful recruitment, trust is gained, this is also an important factor for the virtual employee. Successful recruitment creates a strong collaboration, which is built by individual employees seeking relational trust from others through active participation and timely responses, in-depth feedback, open communication, delivering agreed results and collaborative behavior. Face-to-face meetings are an important investment in building trust during the recruitment process. This can be critical when creating virtual relationships that will last for a longer period of time. Therefore, it is even more important that the recruitment and onboarding process is successful.
Coordination of information. With the right recruitment strategy, successful remote working can provide a new framework for coordination and information to ensure mutual knowledge among the employees they interact with. It can be difficult, especially for new employees, to ensure the same information gets out the right way. Successful recruitment ensures that the team obtains the same information (like ensuring information is distributed evenly and technical issues don't get in the way) and interprets it in the same way.
Use of media. Email alone is insufficient. There are other circumstances where fast collaboration is more important than visual detail. For these situations, onboarding is an important factor as it must be able to introduce the workflows for using platforms such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc. Remote work benefits from having access to augmented technology, such as video conferencing, which gives participants many of the visual cues they would have if they were face-to-face. Video is also particularly useful for complex or sensitive conversations as it feels more personal than written or audio-only communication. This is where Elvium's video module can be used to advantage for virtual recruitment.
Establishing behavioral guidelines. During recruitment, new guidelines follow which create new behavioral guidelines. These guidelines are related to social relationships and tasks that must be followed when employees work together. The onboarding process becomes more successful when remote work becomes more efficient and satisfying if expectations are set for resources and communication among the team. For example, "We use video conferencing for daily check-in meetings, but we use Slack when something is urgent. "
Other successful recruitment and onboarding guidelines could also be task interactions, such as work objectives and deliverables, roles and responsibilities, product specifications, milestones, division of labor, initiative and work rules.
While some recruitment choices about specific expectations may be better than others, the most important factor is that everyone on the team shares the same set of expectations.
