Being a Leader, How to Nurture a Digital Workforce?
Photo by Chris Montgomery https://unsplash.com/photos/smgTvepind4
Managing a digital workforce has its own challenges, and you will face various obstacles that you often won’t face when managing a regular workforce. You might fill your digital workforce with people from all over the place, which you need to communicate with daily. You will not meet them face to face, but you will need to communicate with them via various means, such as video calls, voice chats, instant messaging, emails, and more.
Sometimes, you will need to pass various documents with your team members, and sometimes you also need to sign those documents with digital signatures. It’s best for you to use the best electronic signature solutions, such as Jotform Sign and eOriginal, to manage your electronic assets with ease. So, how can you nurture a digital workforce as a leader?
Here are some tips you can follow:
1. Nurturing a Smooth and Responsive Communication
Communication is the key element of success for you as a leader in nurturing your digital workforce. Without smooth and responsive communication, you will have plenty of problems with your digital workforce. It will get scattered and unbalanced, and you will have great difficulties managing the people in it, let alone get anything done.
Read more: Workplace Communication Strategies
This is the reason it’s important for you to train your team members to communicate with you in a smooth and responsive manner, so you can exchange information with them back and forth with no problem. It should become a rule for your digital workforce to respond to your communications as soon as possible, even more so during work hours.
Extra reading material: Enhance Your Communication Skills
To achieve this end, it’s best for you to use a good instant messaging and video calling platform, such as Skype, Zoom, and Google Hangouts, to get in touch with your team members whenever you need to discuss something with them. Scheduling a video calling session each day can be a great way for you to keep your team members connected and updated with the current project they are working on.
2. Recruiting the Best and Most Reliable Team Members
Another tip you can follow is to recruit the best and most reliable team members for your digital workforce. Recruiting new people for your digital workforce is not a simple thing to do, and you need to put a great effort into ensuring that each person you put into your team will provide the best value, both for the team and for your company. So, the recruiting process needs to be quite detailed, as you need to assess their skills to determine if you can rely on them later.
Read more: The Dos and Don’ts of Recruiting Top Tier Talent
Your team members are the key to your success, because they are the people who will work on your projects, and they are the ones who will determine the success of your business. Make sure that they are the best people you can get and make sure that you can trust and rely on them.
So, it’s important for you to ask some situational questions for the candidates during the recruitment process, as they will prove the genuine quality of each candidate. You can ask them about how they can handle certain problems if they experience such problems during their work, and judging by their responses, you can assess the quality of the candidates and the value that they might bring to your company.
3. Scheduling and Collaboration
Without proper scheduling, you won’t be able to map the action steps you need to take to complete your project. So, scheduling is an important part of nurturing a healthy digital workforce. You need to schedule the tasks that each team member needs to complete for each working day. Also, you will need to assign the tasks to each member as early in the day as possible, so they can work on their tasks throughout the day and complete them on time.
For instance, by using project management software like Trello, you can assign various tasks for your team members and schedule the deadline for each task. The team members will receive all project updates, so they will know the current state of the project. This can help them continue working on the project while keeping their eyes out on the project goals.
This may interest you: Timeboxing – the Ultimate Productivity Tool
Collaboration between team members is another part you need to pay attention to. Collaboration can ensure you can progress well in your project each day. You will know how to use the skills of each team member and assign the tasks most suitable to them. It’s always important for you to build a culture of collaboration between your team members to enhance their teamwork.
4. Making Rooms for Changes
The digital landscape keeps on changing. This is something that you need to keep in mind. The current technology that you are using might no longer be practical for you to use 5 to 10 years from now. So, it’s important for you to get prepared for the coming changes in the digital landscape. The changes might include upgrading the current software you are using, upgrading your hardware, moving your data assets to another cloud infrastructure, and so on.
The point is to make room for potential changes in your digital workforce. It’s no use for you to keep using something, whether it’s an app, hardware equipment, a plan, or any other aspects of your business, which can no longer keep up with the current technology. So, you will need to be ready to implement various changes from time to time, such as moving from traditional asset management to digital asset management, using digital signatures instead of manual signatures on paper, and so on.
It's not just about changing the way you do the work. You should also consider various other things like a hybrid workplace for those employees who find it tough to work from home all the time. Your company should have a hybrid model to give some space for your employees to choose their own options. This way better work efficiency is achieved from your workforce.
5. Regular Evaluations and Work Quality Improvements
Last but not least, you need to perform regular evaluations and quality improvements for your team members. It’s just not enough for you to get the project done. You need to get the project done in the best way. So, you need to get your team members to work their best to complete their assignments, so you can move forward and complete your project in the best way possible. The better you can complete your project, the better it will be for your business.
Supplementary reading: 6 Ways To Efficiently Evaluate Work-From-Home Employees
Regular evaluations are necessary to keep your team members aware of their skills, whether they have improved their skills or kept them stagnant. It’s also important for you to let your team members know about various aspects they can change to improve their work quality. It is something that you should do from time to time, such as every six months. Aside from helping your team members assess their skills and work quality, you can also give them the motivation to keep on getting better each time they complete their assignments.
Conclusion
These are the tips you can follow to nurture a digital workforce as a leader. By nurturing your digital workforce in the right way, you can unleash the full potential of your digital workforce, which will be beneficial for your business. The better they can work on your projects, the better it will be for your business success. The more projects you can complete with excellent work quality, the better your business reputation will be.
It all started with the right management of your digital workforce. Take some time to nurture your digital workforce, as it will become the long-term investment you can rely on for the coming years. Always be ready to learn, adapt, and improve!
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Tags: Be A Leader, Consultant Corner, Foundational Leadership, Quality, Research & Development, Values, Character, Culture, Systems & Structures
This article is published by the editors of Leaderonomics.com with the consent of the guest author.
