8600-338 Understanding How to Manage Remote Workers

Unit Overview

8600-338 Understanding how to Manage Remote Workers is a unit within the ILM Level 3 module that helps build knowledge and understanding of the principles that can be applied in handling remote workers. Within contemporary society, working policies that embrace flexible working have been adopted by organisations. These approaches are adapted as means to improve the convenience with which the worker's acne engages in organisational activities. The policies are also aimed at creating better-working lives where the employees are able to work from different places and deliver on their duties and responsibilities within teams or in the organisation.

 Remote working is one of the principles of flexible working that have been adopted within the organisation. This approach allows the employees to work while not physically present within the organisation and hence presents better working conditions and terms for the employees. However, it is important for the leaders to ensure that they can coordinate the remote workers effectively to ensure that the productivity of teams or the organisation, in general, is not compromised by the lack of physical interactions with team members. 8600-338 Understanding

How to Manage Remote Workers is a unit that aims at helping the leader in teams and the organisations in general to develop the abilities and techniques that they can implement to effectively manage remote workers to ensure they are able to achieve the desired goals and objectives in terms of performance and investment to the organisation activities. This unit is taught in 7 hours of guided learning and contributes two credit values towards the completion of the ILM Level 3 module.

Suitability of the Unit

Companies and organisations that have adopted remote working policies allow employees in different areas of operation to work outside the organisations. As such, leaders in different levels and units within the organisation must be guided to develop the capabilities and skills that are reliant on handling employees who are working away from the organisation. This makes the principles critical for different levels of leadership within the organisation. The unit is suitable for all leaders within the organisation in ensuring that they are able to oversee and facilitate remote working without compromising the output of the employees and the contribution that they make towards accomplishing the goals and objectives.

The unit is specifically designed to provide learning experiences to first line managers, junior manages and team leaders within the organisations these re leaders who are responsible for overseeing team activities. When a team is working remotely, the leaders must have the capacities to effectively manage all team members and ensures they contribute to the teams activities making eh content of this unit suitable for these leaders. However, the unit is also suitable for middle and top level leaders who develop policies as it helps them to understand the critical principles of leadership to consider when implementing the policy of remote working within the organisation. Employees and team members can also pursue the unit to biter understand the concept of remote working and its influence on their performance within the organisation.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Understand the meaning of remote working

• Identify the benefits of remote working for the organisation and for the employees pursuing the approach

• List the potential barriers to remote working for the organisation and for the individuals

• Explain the role that trust plays in promoting remote working within teams and the organisations

• Identify the approaches that can be used to develop trust when managing remote workers

• Show understanding of the role of communication in remote working

• Describe the approaches that can be used to effectively communicate with remote workers

• Explain the role and nature of motivation when managing remote workers within the organisation and team

• Describe approaches to give and receive effective feedback in the process of communicating with remote workers

• Identify methods that can be used to overcome isolation for remote workers

• Show understanding of principles of health and safety as they apply to remote workers

• Understand the approaches that leaders can use to provide support for remote working

Key Learning Areas

Since remote working is one of the fastest developing approaches to human resource management, learners must ensure that they have knowledge on the principles that they can use to achieve the goals and objectives in this approach. 8600-338 Understanding how to Manage Remote Workers focuses on providing leaners with this training. Some of the main learning areas that the unit covers in achieving this goals include:

Understanding Remote Working

This area of learning helps to understand the principles of remote working. Learner are introduced to the developments in flexible working including the remote working and its benefits as well as disadvantages within the organisation. They are guided on the approaches they can use to determine individuals who are allowed to use remote working based on different policies and principles.

Leading Remote Working

This area of learning focuses on approaches that should be used to effectively lead remote workers with a team. It involves developing communication, trust, motivation and skills development approaches as tools of managing people remotely.

Additionally, the learners are helps to understand approaches that they can use to create a sense of belonging and address issues of isolation for remote workers. The use of skill for remote working such as time management, problem solving, and decision making and information technology skill sis used to effectively achieve the desired goals in remote working and the learners are trained on effectively using these techniques to implement remote working.

Supporting Remote Workers

This area of learning helps the learners to develop mechanisms that they can use to provide the relevant support to the remote workers. This includes being able to provide support that is technical to the remote workers. It involves being able to utilise existing technology to support the activities of remote workers and ensure that the desired goals and objectives are achieved. The area of leaning also helps in developing a remote working policy as well and approaches to promote health and safety principles in relation to remote workers.

Evaluation

On completion of the unit, the learners are evaluated using different mechanisms. A written assessment is used to evaluate the understanding of theoretical principles. Simulated exercises and supervised practices are also used in the formative phase to determine ability to apply learned concepts in practical settings.