Are you expected to manage a remote team and increase its productivity while working from home? Since you can no longer walk over people’s desks and keep a check on their productivity, it is essential to figure out strategies that will help you translate the environment of your office to virtual meetings effectively.
When the pandemic forced all of us to work remotely, it was undeniably a challenging task for me to adapt to this new routine overnight and boost remote team productivity.
However, through well-formulated strategies and consistent effort to figure things out, I was able to notice a significant rise in the effectiveness of remote team management. If you’ve landed in a similar situation, consider these 7 ways to increase remote team productivity and communication listed in this guide.
7 ways to increase remote team productivity
1. Avoid constant inspections
Being tempted to check over your team and micromanage is natural while you are working remotely, especially because you can no longer reach out to them at their desks and ask questions. However, this might not give you the expected results, and you may end up wasting time in an attempt to track your team’s progress.
If you wish to enhance employee productivity while working from home, trusting your team and giving them enough autonomy would result in greater job satisfaction and a sense of accountability. Implementing a reliable workflow management system can help in this regard. Avoiding constant inspections and building trust will definitely boost productivity while working remotely. This system can provide transparency, facilitate communication, and streamline task allocation and tracking, allowing you to monitor progress without the need for micromanagement.
2. Keep a check on working hours
If you’re looking to increase remote team productivity, my second tip would be to keep a check on working hours by keeping them relaxed and flexible for your team, as well as making sure that you are not overloading your employees. If your team can deliver excellence and work productively at a particular hour, they should be allowed work accordingly.
You may set up business hours where you would expect your team’s presence and offer them flexible work hours to ensure their work-life balance. At the same time, you also have to ensure that you’re not overloading your team with urgent work to the extent that it messes up with their personal commitments. You can also use an hour tracker for work.
3. Resolve technical issues
Adapting to constant change and switching to remote working can get challenging for those who are used to regular office interactions. While your team is expected to adapt to these changes and work with technology, it is extremely important for you to be patient and ready to resolve technical issues as and when they arise.
You may set up a technical staff to deal with all the technology-related problems your team may encounter or hire offshore developers for this purpose, as addressing those issues becomes essential for productivity. In a digitalized world, you should have a great tech talent who can fix anything on your virtual desktop system or repair the hardware of your PC. You should ensure that the inability of your team to solve a technical issue doesn’t delay work and hamper productivity.
For instance, you should ensure that your team is not suffering because of unneeded and junk files on their Mac that may have caused their system to slow down and result in constant glitches. Resolving these errors and glitches will enhance the performance of their systems and eventually boost their productivity.
4. Emphasize effective communication
Communicating, brainstorming, and being in touch with your team will motivate them and automatically boost their profits while working from home. It would be best to invest in remote communication tools and emphasize the significance of effective communication.
You can even use your preferred channel of communication and use Google meetings, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, or any other medium suited for remote communications. You should also formulate guidelines and suggestions which your team can comply with.
However, you should make sure not to overdo cross-channel communication as it might impact your team negatively when it comes to productivity.
5. Acknowledge efforts
The next tip to increase remote team productivity would be to recognize and appreciate the efforts made by your team. You might have been doing it while working physically, but its importance in a remote setting can never be over-emphasized.
Suppose you ignore the hard work and time put in by your team to complete a task effectively and let all their efforts go unappreciated. In that case, you will definitely affect their productivity negatively. If you expect your team to maximize their productivity, you shouldn’t stay behind when it comes to noticing team efforts and accomplishment of tasks.
6. Productive and limited meetings
Too much of video conferences that run throughout the day may cause exhaustion among team members and prompt them to lose their productivity besides feeling demotivated. If you are trying to improve remote productivity, long and numerous meetings would work in the opposite direction.
There are a lot of ways in which you can prevent unnecessary meetings. For imparting information that doesn’t require a lot of explaining, you can always resort to a presentation being emailed to your team instead of another video conference. You should keep aside long meetings only for significant stuff that requires discussing and brainstorming.
7. Make use of time-tracking tools
Time tracking is an important tip when it comes to improving remote team productivity, as it allows you to monitor the work performed by your team and track attendance online. Time tracking tools present a clear picture of the way your team members might be spending their time to give you an idea about their productivity levels. Many project management tools are also excellent for tracking the work being done by your team and analyzing the progress.
Conclusion
Uncertain times can make it overwhelming for anyone to manage a remote team and boost its productivity. However, using the right strategies and productivity hacks, you can not just simplify this task for yourself but also notice better productivity while your team works remotely.
Just by following a few guidelines that abstain you from constantly checking on your team’s progress and prompt you to look into the usage of time-tracking tools, you can bring commendable results.
From acknowledging team efforts to emphasizing the need for effective communication and resolving technology-related issues, there are a number of strategies that you can inculcate in your working hours for improved remote team productivity.
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