6 Strategies for Hiring and Retaining Productive Remote Employees

Productivity is a top priority for businesses, as 71% of leaders feel pressure from executives to increase it. This demand makes hiring – and retaining – productive employees even more crucial, especially for remote roles, where ensuring high performance can be challenging without direct oversight.

With 22% of the American workforce projected to be remote by next year, mastering the art of selecting productive remote talent is essential for sustaining growth and maintaining a competitive edge. 

As organizations expand their remote teams, selecting candidates with the right skills and who excel in a remote work environment is essential. Below are six strategies to help you hire the right talent to increase employee productivity and create a strong remote employee experience. 

1. Determine If Remote Work is Right For Your Team

Before diving into hiring strategies, you should evaluate if remote work fits your team’s structure and goals. 

While remote work has undeniable benefits, not every team or role thrives in a remote environment. Here’s how to gauge if it aligns with your organization’s needs.

• Assess team experience: Consider the tenure and experience levels across your team. For seasoned employees, remote work may feel natural due to established knowledge and autonomy. But for newer or entry-level staff, remote environments can sometimes lead to challenges in training and onboarding. Think about how remote work may impact productivity, collaboration, and learning for different experience levels on your team, and consider how you can combat any obstacles (like mentorship or in-person events).
• Evaluate cultural alignment: Your company’s culture is a strong indicator of remote compatibility. If your organization values in-person interactions for brainstorming or teamwork, shifting to remote may create a cultural gap. On the other hand, if flexibility, independence, and digital communication are already core to your culture, remote work could enhance engagement. Conduct surveys or hold open discussions to understand if employees feel connected and productive when working remotely.
• Identify roles requiring on-premises work: Not all roles adapt well to remote settings. For some industries, certain job functions – such as equipment-dependent tasks or hands-on customer service – require an on-site presence. Conduct a role-based analysis to identify which tasks can be performed remotely and which can’t. If only specific roles need to stay on-premises, a hybrid model might be your ideal solution.

Balancing these factors can help you decide if remote work aligns with your business and operational goals. And here’s the thing: obviously, you can combat all of the above considerations with a thorough remote work strategy. But you must commit to creating a really solid employee experience – one filled with intentional hiring and retention strategies, data-driven decisions, and comprehensive performance management – to ensure your remote team runs smoothly. 

2. Define Productivity

Once you’ve determined fit, you’re ready to explore hiring strategies to build a productive remote team.

Your first step? Defining productivity. 

Productivity is not a one-size-fits-all concept, because what signifies high performance for one company can differ significantly for another. This variance extends across different departments and even from team to team within the same organization.

For instance, the sales team may measure productivity by the efficiency of closing deals and the ability to meet or exceed sales targets. In contrast, the software development team might prioritize the efficiency in developing and deploying software.

Tip: Use a clear and tailored definition of productivity to pinpoint the specific skills needed for each position. This will ensure that candidates are well-suited for the role and create the framework for effective goal-setting and performance evaluations after onboarding.

3. Expand Your Reach And Increase Diversity

One of the most significant advantages of remote hiring is that you’re not limited to local boundaries like traditional hiring. You can hire individuals from different cities, states, and even other countries to access specialized skills and unique abilities that may be scarce or unavailable in your local job market.

Going beyond your usual candidate pool enhances the quality of your teams and introduces innovative thought processes that can drive your organization forward. Removing location barriers also promotes greater diversity, empowering you to hire remote employees from various cultures and infuse your workforce with various experiences and ideas.

Bringing together diverse talents under one virtual roof enriches your teams’ collective skillset and leads to more creative, dynamic, and effective solutions. Meta’s Chief Diversity Officer, Maxine Williams, highlights this advantage: “For the first time, we’re hiring individuals who are fully remote and working from locations where we don’t have offices, increasing the diversity of our candidate pool and workforce.”

Meta attributes its technological advancements and ingenuity to hiring people from various cultures and backgrounds, and eliminating their geographical constraints made it possible. While remote work offers immense benefits, it also raises the question: How do you ensure you’re hiring someone who is productive and will thrive in a remote work environment?

Implementing strategic hiring practices is essential to select candidates who possess the traits and skills necessary to increase your overall workforce productivity.

4. Ask The Right Questions

Asking the right questions is paramount to uncovering a candidate’s true potential. You want to ask thoughtful and targeted interview questions to help you choose the best employees.

Assessing a candidate’s productivity in a remote setting requires more than surface-level inquiries. You want to ask questions about how they manage their time, prioritize tasks, stay motivated, and overcome challenges without direct supervision.

Here are some essential interview questions to help you identify productive remote employees:

How did you organize your tasks on a typical day in your previous remote role?

This question provides a snapshot of the candidate’s daily routine and ability to structure their workday effectively. It also helps you understand their time management skills and how they maintain productivity.

How do you prioritize your tasks when you have multiple deadlines to meet?

Here, you can assess whether the candidate can create an effective framework to handle their workload. If their answer demonstrates strong prioritization skills, follow up with: “Can you describe how you would manage those deadlines without getting overwhelmed?”

Be sincere and assure them that you never want to hit their threshold. Your goal is to understand their capacity and how to best support them, ensuring they won’t burn out.

Can you provide a time when you had to stay focused to complete a project with minimal oversight?

Asking this question helps you evaluate the candidate’s ability to work independently and stay on track with limited external supervision. You can also ask how they hold themselves accountable for their work. 

Then, follow it up by asking for an example of when they took the initiative to improve a process without being asked. It’ll reveal if they have a proactive nature, a willingness to take ownership, and a strong sense of responsibility.

How do you handle feedback in a remote work environment and use it to improve your performance?

Since productive employees seek and utilize feedback to enhance their productivity, this question assesses whether they use feedback constructively. It also gauges their willingness to adjust and improve for better performance.

5. Nurture High-Performing Employees 

Hiring productive remote employees is only one part of the equation. Retaining and keeping them engaged for their employee lifecycle is another. 

Angelika Reich, a partner with McKinsey, calls high-performing employees “thriving stars,” and she suggests handling them with great care.

Reich states, “Thriving stars [are] the first people everyone is running to when there is a new project or an additional initiative or something to take on. Because they’re the ones who are going to overdeliver. So to deal with thriving stars, it’s important to provide development opportunities for them, to give them the appreciation they need, and to really care about them.”

In other words, it’s essential to review your remote work strategy to retain these valuable team members and ensure it’s designed to nurture productivity and engagement. 

Ask yourself:

• Does your strategy genuinely connect with your people?
• Is it set up to establish effective communication across the team?
• Does it promote employee well-being and work-life balance?

Addressing these questions helps create an environment where productive remote employees feel valued and supported. As your company, industry, and work in general continue to evolve, it’s crucial to adapt your remote work strategy to support your employees and their experience with your organization.

6. Celebrate Productive Traits

Productivity in remote work isn’t merely logging long hours or completing a week’s worth of tasks in a few days. Instead, productivity centers on employees effectively managing their time, prioritizing tasks, and contributing meaningfully to their teams. 

To help you identify truly productive remote employees, look for these characteristics:

• Prioritization: A key trait of productive remote workers is their exceptional ability to prioritize tasks effectively. They discern which tasks are most critical and address them first. They understand the bigger picture and align their daily activities with their team’s goals, ensuring their efforts contribute directly to the organization’s success.

• Disciplined and self-motivated: Productive employees’ discipline distinguishes them from their peers. They possess a strong drive that keeps them focused and engaged. They set goals for themselves, seek out challenges, and take initiative. This proactive mindset boosts their performance and can inspire their colleagues.

• Tend to observe problems for solutions: Productive employees can focus on solutions instead of dwelling on problems. They proactively approach issues with critical thinking, enabling them to navigate obstacles and maintain progress on their projects.

• Desire to continuously improve: Another key trait of productive remote employees is their dedication to ongoing and professional growth. They consistently seek feedback and learning opportunities and adapt well to new tools and methodologies that enhance their performance. Their commitment to self-improvement ensures they remain valuable assets to the organization.

• Quickly regain focus: We’ve all had a bad day before, but what truly matters is how we pull ourselves together to continue the week positively. Productive employees embody this resilience and swiftly regain their focus after setbacks. When they get off track, they’re back on course quickly. They also do their best to minimize distractions to ensure their overall productivity isn’t derailed.

Tip: While it’s recommended that you celebrate your employees and their achievements regularly, make sure you appropriately budget in your compensation plan to reward them monetarily, too. Otherwise, top talent—with limited opportunities for growth—may walk out the (figurative) door. 

Make Hiring and Retaining the Right People Part of Your Remote Work Strategy

Remote work boosts diversity, bringing new perspectives to your organization that enhance productivity. To sustain this advantage, it’s imperative to understand what productivity looks like for your company and select candidates who align with that vision. 

By asking the right questions and identifying the common traits of productive remote employees, you can assemble a team of motivated individuals eager to get the work done and more.

Of course, your work isn’t done; you must nurture these high-performing employees and create a positive work environment that will help them thrive and bring success to their team and your organization.