Years of experience as a remote project manager has brought me to career advancement and a lot of challenges, too. The shift in focus to online project management has brought a drastic change in both office-based and virtual companies.

The job demanded so much effort and expertise which extended to more than just monitoring simultaneous projects. This includes superb communication within different teams within the company. My role as a remote project manager is both challenging and rewarding as I extend my project management skills to people management in order to create an environment in which a remote worker can thrive while doing the things they ultimately love.

Benefits of being a HOPLA remote project manager

Deserting the office work setup was the best decision I ever made. But leaving my previous work wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t find a new home at HOPLA (Home-based Organised Professionals Leveraging Agility), a team of global talents working from home. Here I found a new venue to dedicate my project management skills while living a balanced life out of my computer monitor.

  • Making remote teamwork possible. Having a team of remote workers who connect only via the internet, I was hesitant that it would be possible to create a collaborative team that supports each other throughout the project duration and beyond. My experience at HOPLA gave me the opportunity to explore employees’ working habits that may be ultimately different from each other but still deliver the same quality output as expected.
  • Freedom to work and play responsibly. Compared to my role as a project manager in a huge company, taking a vacation would mean a bunch of workloads when I get back to my desk. That’s not the case when I started my role as a remote project manager at HOPLA. Months after getting the hang out of my new role– learning how each task works for every remote employee and setting the right expectations, I worked on managing my time to squeeze in mini vacations to get me back in the zone and clear my head to get back in the game for when crunch time hits again.
  • Leveraging on automation. One thing that still impresses me until today is how HOPLA can execute a 24/7 business hour. Giving employees the freedom to work on their preferred hours, not to mention that the team is distributed across the world, smart automation enables HOPLA to operate 24 hours a day. Using tools essential for communication, collaboration, and time-tracking, cost-tracking, and more has lifted the heavy weight of project management which used to consume most of my time in my previous project management jobs.
  • High-end security. Having the freedom to work without borders comes to the responsibility of keeping all clients’ data secured. Security is never an issue at HOPLA as the company itself offers data and security services for all kinds of business. If we can protect other company’s data, imagine what we do to secure our own.
  • Work-life balance. As a city girl, I’ve always accepted the fact that traffic will be part of life until I got tired of it. I used to spend hours traveling from home to work and back, dealing with the daily traffic. Those hours could have been spent with family and loved ones instead. Since I started working from home, I found more time for myself, my family, and finding a new hobby which led to personal happiness, satisfaction, and improved productivity.

Maintaining high employee retention

As a remote project manager, it has become my role to help employee retention in the company. Work from home is not a hundred percent glamourous. Just like any other work-from-home companies, we still encounter employees who tend to leave in a short period of time or worse, leave without saying goodbye. Being left behind without a word is painful that I, together with my co-project managers, had to come up with ways on how to become effective at my job.

We considered establishing strict but reasonable rules and regulations on hiring, promotions, and incentives aiming to encourage employees to stay and see themselves grow professionally and individually within the company. But the most basic of all, it’s saying a word of appreciation for every task well done that’s key to strengthen project-manager-team member relationship.

Dealing with the ups and downs

Fulfilling the role of a project manager at HOPLA is not as perfect as with all other organizations. I’ve experienced dealing with ghosting employees, unmet deadlines, miscommunications, to mention a few. However, I have long accepted that this is part of the job and has opened more opportunities for me to find better and dedicated team members who I am with today. HOPLA has now gathered remote professionals who value their work and aspire to positively impact business using their very own skills.

I’ve helped clients who started from zero leading to their first sale, as well as struggling businesses who want to get back in the game. There’s a specific solution for every problem and the answer would always be a smart project planning, good task delegation, teamwork, and most of all, the intention to push an organization to attain success.