How To Ensure Employees Working Remotely Are Being Productive?
Working remotely is no longer a new concept. Most people are not accustomed to actually working from home, though a small number of people from certain career fields have been doing this for years. In response to the current state of the coronavirus, many companies have asked their employees to work remotely.
The transition to remote work was not easy. Most companies have not had the chance to really consider the remote working options or optimize the remote work arrangements. Due to the emergency situation most companies needed to go virtual by necessity. As a result, business owners have faced challenges and uncertainties around remote team performance, efficiency and productivity.
How do you ensure employees are doing their work productively when they work from home? How do you keep your team motivated and track their performance?
The remote working arrangement works best when it empowers everyone to do their best regardless of company size. You need to tailor your remote work model for your employees to help them understand that their efficiency in work matters more than where, when or how they’re working. According to Entrepreneur, remote workers have to adopt a few characteristics like self-discipline, and strong communication skills to a higher degree. At the same time, remote workers need to be capable of running their own businesses in changing circumstances while keeping an open mind and a positive attitude.
Fortunately, there are many ways you can achieve a highly efficient and productive remote team. Here are few tips that will help you to understand the performance and productivity of your remote employees:
Find the right balance for your business and workforce.
Ideally, remote employees don’t have to start working at the same time every day. Allow your employees to start and end their workday between a given time frame. Let your employees have the freedom to work in the way that’s most productive for them, of course, it isn’t always possible to allow employees to start late or finish late. You may be stuck managing every employee and everything remotely, in that case, the key to success is to, again, tailor the model that works the best for your business and remote workforce.
Try to identify the employees who are well suited for remote work, give them the responsibility to manage the important projects. Then, recognize the employees for whom remote work is a learning curve, help them with extra mentorship to adjust to remote working methods. For your entire remote workforce, communication is pivotal, make sure your team is well connected and understand their duties and responsibilities.
Communication is King
When workers don’t communicate properly, it can be challenging and misunderstandings can take place. When speaking over the phone or in video calls, clear communication is a must. Keep the lines of contact open for all your employees with regular phone or Zoom meetings. Ensure that every remote worker has access to a computer equipped with a webcam, high-speed internet connection and a high-quality headset to participate in a virtual meeting. Let your remote workforce know you are there for them whenever they need you. Conduct a daily video meeting at a specific time with all your employees, this practice will create unity by engaging with your remote workers and encouraging workers to work as a team even being apart. During meetings ask employees about their wellbeing. The conversation will inspire them to be more productive because it will create positive morale.
Remember that communication is about more than managing remote employees and projects. For a distributed team, it’s also essential for maintaining organizational culture. Discuss how you can celebrate achievements, recognize workers and have fun remotely. Over the internet, these things don’t happen like they do in a regular office.
Be organized
When it comes to working with remote teams, it is important to be organized. Although a concrete plan is a must, you should be open to adjusting strategies as needed. Plan how you would like your team to work, assign projects with deadlines and follow up about project updates every day at the end of the day.
Stay transparent
Building trust with a remote team is a hard task. Building relationships takes more effort because there are fewer chance meetings and office chats. Being transparent can help you build trust with your remote teams; it shows that you value your team. It also sets the precedent for open communication.
Install a monitoring software
The benefits of using productivity tracking software include data tracking in real time, improving organizational structure, identifying what tools employees need and most importantly identifying employees’ most productive periods and which teams work best together. Real time monitoring allows you to know about employee work activity while they are working from home without micromanaging. The software also tracks employee working hours, keeps record of employee work activity, keeps record of web/app usage and measures employee’s overall productivity on the basis of overall work activity of each employee giving you a clear idea about how an employee has worked during the day. Productivity tracking can also allow admins to distribute workloads more evenly to take some pressure off overworked employees.
On the other hand, when an employee knows they are being monitored, productivity is likely to increase. The rise in productivity is due to a psychological principle, which is when someone knows they’re being observed, they will change their behavior. In the workplace, utilizing productivity monitoring software is just that.
How to Get Started with Productivity Tracking?
If you decide that productivity tracking is the right tool to manage your remote workforce for you, then it’s time to move on to looking at features that will help you achieve your goals. Here are some features of an advanced robust employee monitoring software, CloudDesk, that you may want to think about when researching productivity monitoring software:
● Time tracking
● Website and App Monitoring
● Screenshots
● Record of idle minutes
● Face ID Verification
● Activity Reports
● Flexible Settings
Productivity isn’t just working. It’s working the right way and accomplishing goals within a given time frame. There are many monitoring software options available in the market, most of them come with lots of features which are actually unnecessary. It is also difficult to understand the dashboard of such software that has too many features. Surely you don’t want to invest too many hours to understand what your team is doing. CloudDesk comes with exact features that will help you to understand how your employees are working, without hampering their privacy.
