There’s a wealth of management books and motivational speakers that can tell you how to increase engagement and maximize staff productivity in a physical environment. But what if you’ve never even seen your team? How do you gauge their interest? How do you find out what makes them tick?

Building the kind of cohesiveness and team spirit that defines a successful business can be especially difficult when working with remote employees. That’s why we’ve collected some of the best practices from the professional world to help you make remote working work.

Right from the start it’s important to have absolute clarity on roles and expectations. With physical distance and differences in time-zones, simple requests for clarification on responsibility can cause significant delays in projects. Similarly, it is useful to share information about the organization’s goals so that remote staff can see the bigger picture that they are part of.

One of the biggest advantages for employees when it comes to remote work is its flexibility. When employees can set their timetable around their own most productive hours the increases in productivity can be anywhere between 13%[8] and 35%[10]. This means loosening rigid work-hours and measuring work by actual output rather than time clocked.

Keeping a remote team happy and engaged takes some effort on the part of management and it can also be tough to shift to a very different way of working. However, with access to a global talent pool and large savings on physical space, remote working can be a game-changer for your organization.