4 Essential Steps to Form Great Work-From-Home Ethics with Your Clients

What are the keys to success when working remotely with a client as a consultant? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

As a consultant, working remotely with a client is a time and energy consuming task. Depending on the type of consulting services you provide and the level of consulting solutions required by your client, there is a close professional relationship to maintain and develop. These are some important key points that you can introduce into your client relationship for a successful run:

1. Establish a good and trustworthy relationship from the start. With proper communication, a mutual understanding of your client’s needs and how you propose to fulfill them, you can move forward on the same foot and direct your working dynamic with a strong start. Share information such as your designated work hours, your methods and your work habits so as to avoid any potential conflicts.
2. Work out an effective mode of communication, since only remote means are available. Check out applications and softwares designed as digital workspaces to ensure that efficient communication can be attained in connection to the work getting done. Maintain weekly updates and set up meetings to play out the long-term plan.
3. Enforce deadlines and strictly keep them up without fail to keep up your progress and stay on track with your project. This will provide more clarity to your client as well, about the structure of your services and their tiers of involvement required.
4. Utilize virtual tools to save and store all important information data. Project management softwares as well as cloud-based storage systems are preferred to lay out the semantics of your project, which can easily be referred by your client with given access. Use the best virtual meeting tools to guarantee that your meetings are executed as planned. Most importantly, it is crucial that you communicate with your client about these matters, to collect their opinion and make sure that they are also comfortable with the choices.

Although remote work presents many challenges, these can be overcome by ensuring you have a plan in place and strategies in line for regular communication. You are then all set to develop a successful long-term relationship with your client. I hope this gives you a penny for your thoughts.

Contributed by Dalia Gurrion,Practice Management Consultant at Complete Dental Consulting