7 Must-Have Remote Work Skills for Remote Workers in 2021

The remote work trend has grown common across many industries over the past few decades. After the recent pandemic, it forced many organizations to send their workers home. ‘Working from Home’ was suddenly every employee’s status.

Traditional working methods are now changing, and these changes are leaving a lasting impact on every sector. One of the major adjustments that HR professionals and hiring managers focus on includes remote skills. But more importantly, they have to identify them in their advanced hiring process.

If companies don’t adapt remote work practices, they may not expand in this brave new world. The major skills they may have appreciated in the past five to ten years aren’t enough anymore. With the right HR team, you can identify necessary remote skills that will ensure more productivity and quality work.

How to Test the Skills of Remote Workers?

A scattered workforce in any organization can make the managing and hiring process a bit complex. To make it smooth and successful, you need to get a mixture of worker attributes and leadership skills. To test each individual remote worker’s skill, follow the tips below.

MS Excel Skills Test

They should have the ability to enter data, but it must be well-organized and analyzed. Hiring managers should specify informative recommendations as a necessary job requirement. If you want to prepare a financial report, monitor marketing sales, or create sales forecasts, you must hire remote workers with satisfactory command over MS Excel.

Email Skills Test

You can find a suitable candidate who has a fair amount of knowledge about clear communication, email functions, and standard guidelines. Through email skills tests, you can identify an individual’s capabilities of responsive communication via emails.

Basic Digital Literacy

Computers and laptops are significant for remote work. Various companies and occupations require modern knowledge of laptops or computers to proceed to work.

7 Essential Skills for Remote Workers

When you allow your business to have remote workers, ultimately, you’re attracting potential hires. It also helps your business build a skill-full team that can compete more efficiently. The remote hiring process allows you to reach out to talent in other geographic areas, which is not possible if you expect them to work in-office full-time.

To make a successful team of remote workers, you have to hire candidates that can succeed and perform proactively in a remote environment. Here are 7 skills you must look upon;

Independent Nature

Several employees are dreaming of having personal freedom, and they can attain it from remote work. Ditch formal shoes, trousers with ties, and long commutes in change for remote work. Some might even appreciate the idea of not being surrounded and troubled by troublesome co-workers.

Many of them may not even think that working without co-workers can also be a bit lonely. A few days of unstop productivity can get old fashioned and turn into an exercise in everyday isolation.

If the candidate has experience working as an independent employee, he/she is the perfect fit. Because consistency is the most important part of remote work, not everyone can work independently every day for years.

Collaborative

You should value and appreciate an independent remote worker who doesn’t have as much handholding to complete a task. But the trade-off might become a bit resourceful, yet overly achieved workers may fail to corporate or communicate with co-workers on assigned projects. So, make sure that the communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills of an individual is good.

Self-Motivated

When you’re working in your home office and facing a blank screen with no one to talk to, how will you continue? There must be something that will help you go. With no boss or co-worker to talk to, the remote employee must hold an internal motivation to achieve daily productivity and goals.

While hiring someone, ask them about their source of motivation. Some are motivated with accomplishments, incentives, perfectionism, etc. Learn about them and see which one of them has it all planned and how an individual is planning to self-motivate and select the most impressive but realistic one.

Organization

In starting every project, you must let your remote employees work under a little supervision for a better-organized workflow. This includes managing communication threads, projects, time, etc. Remember, an unorganized remote worker will not be a great asset for the company. They may delay assignments or won’t follow the work process.

Strong Writing Skills

Smooth remote work mostly relies on strong written communication skills. No employer can appreciate a co-worker who sits right next to them and keeps on asking questions. It’s even impossible if you pop into your boss’s office and start face-to-face communication.

Professional way of communication is through email, Slack, or skype, and communicating through writing skills is necessary. Effective communication is one that has zero grammatical errors. You can arrange a quick grammar test in your hiring process.

Tech-Savvy

Applications like Teams and Slack won’t help your team if they don’t know how to operate them. An effective remote worker is one who is comfortable with using these technologies or other advanced tools.

They must be capable enough to switch on a Zoom video or voice call easily. Edit a presentation, respond to any query proactively, and use Google Docs. It’s also important to have advanced equipment, including reliable internet, smartphones, and internet.

Adaptability

Employees with professional interaction are aware of days when they suddenly go off the rails. Every remote worker who is spending time at home is handling work stress and project deadlines. But some of them are also dealing with some distractions like internet issues, annoying noise, etc. However, these things are normal, and they will happen; you can’t stop them.

Skillful and talented professional remote workers overcome these issues with focus and flexibility. Effective workers don’t give up because of everyday hiccups. They have sufficient management skills and time to work under any circumstances.

Final Takeaway

When you hire a remote team, you may face plenty of hiccups, and it’s because you’re not an expert. So, why not hire an expert? Aspired has been providing professional and expert remote teams to hundreds of businesses around the globe successfully. How to test the skills of remote workers? Leave it to team Aspired; they will take care of this and provide you with a report for future references.