Remote Work isn’t All Sunshine and Puppy Walks

Remote work is great, and a lot of folks are digging it. Really.

But, like everything, it’s not all perks. Telecommuting comes with a number of potential pitfalls.

When your team goes remote, whether by choice or necessity, it’s important that you’re realistic about issues that might arise — and how they could hurt your company.

We don’t want to deter you from remote work entirely, though. In fact, we’re huge fans, and JAR is a remote company.

By providing appropriate resources, you can mitigate challenges you might face and ensure telecommuting works for everyone on your team.

Below, we take a look at potential hurdles, and explore how an internal podcast can help you overcome them for success and longevity.

Lack of face time

When your team is working remotely, they miss out on quality facetime with their coworkers — a standard perk of in-office work.

An internal podcast can help you make up for this. While it won’t magically teleport your folks into an after-work happy hour, it can provide many of the elements of a real-world experience.

This is a medium that conveys:

• Warmth
• Humor
• Emotion
• Kinship
• And feeling

The result? A sense of heart and humanity you can’t get from other mediums.

Slack is great. So are Zoom meetings. But they fail to provide the organic, human experience an internal podcast offers.

When you host a team member on your series, you’re sending them on what feels like an extended, intimate coffee date with every other member of your team.

If you want your people to invest in your business, they need to invest in each other.

To do this, they need to see each other as:

• Living
• Breathing
• Feeling
• Thinking
• And even flawed human beings

This complexity is impossible to convey through written word or disjointed Zoom meetings.

Lack of growth

Would you want to work for a company that leaves you feeling stagnant? (Of course not.)

Professional growth is essential for worker fulfillment which plays a huge role in your brand’s longevity.

Unfortunately, without in-person experiences, growth can become a bit tricky.

A traditional workspace creates opportunities for real-time sharing, and collective learning comes naturally to in-person teams.

In a remote work environment, on the other hand, these opportunities don’t come as often, or as easily.

It can be difficult to convey complex ideas or processes over Slack — even harder in the context of a crowded Zoom meeting.

With an internal podcast, your team members are able to share:

• What they’re learning
• What they know
• What inspires them
• And what they believe

Clearly, these kinds of conversations are crucial. They foster not only progress — but long-term investment from the most valuable members of your team.

Lack of culture

Much like professional development, culture is huge when it comes to retention and long-term success.

You can analyze that bottom line till the cows come home — but if you can’t keep good people on your team, there’s no real future for your company.

Unfortunately, workplace culture can be tricky to establish in an era of remote teams.

If you’ve been working remotely for a while, you probably know how easy it is to quietly clock-in, plug away for eight hours, and head off to dinner without ever really engaging with your company.

When day after day passes just like this, your team members miss out on company culture and can start to feel like a cog in a machine.

With an internal podcast, you can build culture by:

• Sharing your values
• Emphasizing your purpose
• Setting the emotional tone you desire
• And conveying your brand’s unique personality

Every time a team member tunes into your series, they’re given valuable data about the meaning, message, and heart of your organization, and your teams.

Lack of community

One of the biggest challenges of remote work is that, if you’re not careful, your team members can get… well, pretty lonely. (Trust us, we’ve been telecommuting since before it was a necessity.)

If you don’t want each member of your team to feel like an island unto themselves, you should be offering them more than instant messaging.

An internal podcast creates a communal experience much richer than what you’ll get from words on a screen.

We like to think of it this way:

• A Slack message feels like a text.
• A podcast feels like a phone call.

If you wanted to feel like part of a real, human, living, breathing community, which would you rather receive?

Lack of engagement

Again, when employees fall into a clock-in, clock-out cycle five days a week, it can be difficult to get them to actively engage with your team.

An internal podcast can help you create the levels of engagement you want for your company.

You can use your podcast to:

• Build a feedback loop by inviting their input
• Inspire them to take chances and learn new things
• Foster emotional investment and big-picture thinking
• And encourage them to engage with coworkers they might otherwise never meet

According to a recent report from Gallup, 85% of the global workforce are either “not actively engaged” or “actively disengaged” when they go to work. Yikes.

Imagine how easy it is to become part of this statistic when your people are working remotely.

An internal podcast can help you avoid this dynamic — so you can build exceptional, invested, optimized teams.

Innovation as necessity

Clearly, remote work comes with a lot of perks — and a lot of challenges that could seriously impact everyone on your team.

If your folks telecommute, you need to be innovative to hold their attention and maintain the heart of your company.

An internal podcast may be just the thing.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to Internal Podcasts to learn more — or touch base with our remote team.

Written by Roger Nairn, JarAudio.com