Maybe your business already outsourced work to remote workers or you’ve been forced to adopt a work-from-home situation due to COVID-19. Either way, you have likely asked yourself whether your workforce is able to maintain productivity when working remotely. Working from home can be tough for many people. Especially if that workforce hasn’t been used in a while. So, is it possible for your team to be as productive working remotely as they were in the office?
In this article, we’re going to look at ways to ensure your remote team is staying productive. Then what you can do if they aren’t.
Setting Your Expectations
Before you ask yourself whether you can maintain productivity with a remote team, you need to think about what you consider productive. What’s your minimum expectation for weekly or monthly output?
Look at each sector of your business. This includes marketing, production, sales, accounts, operations, etc. Decide what you consider as a productive week in each field. Whether that’s the running of a successful marketing campaign with high-quality content, the account completed and up-to-date by the end of each week, or hitting specific sales targets each week.
Once you determine what you consider productive, you need to communicate those expectations to your teams. You can go one step further and create a weekly to-do list for each team. This ensures they know exactly what is expected each week. But there are other measures you can implement as well to help your team maintain productivity.
Increase Autonomy
Giving your remote team more autonomy has quite a few benefits. Firstly, it gives your team more responsibility. This means they’ll have to pay more attention to detail to ensure everything is completed and to the correct standard.
Increased autonomy can also make them feel more appreciated and respected. In essence, they feel trusted. Most of the time, this added trust will be reciprocated. Your team will consistently deliver work to maintain their reputation as reliable and trustworthy.
Deadlines
This might be an obvious point, but deadlines are really important to ensure your team is maintaining productivity.
Setting the right deadline can be tricky, as it depends on the complexity of specific tasks. So you’ll have to experiment to see what works best.
However, one thing you can do is help your team prioritize their tasks by showing them the tasks which are most important versus the ones that can wait. This can be easily done if you use workspace tools like Asana. This enables you to create tags to sort high-priority tasks for low-priority ones.
Time Trackers
Time trackers can be an easy way for you to see how long your team is spending on specific tasks. You can try time trackers that monitor activity by tracking keystrokes and that also take regular screenshots (usually at 10-minute intervals).
While time tracking can be useful for specific tasks, it can have shortfalls. For example, your team members may be working hard but not necessarily always working or typing on the screen, which would result in the time tracker showing a low productivity score.
Also, the pressure of having to type or work on screen to prove your working could put your team under unnecessary micro-stress. That said, it’s still a good idea to encourage your team to use a tracker for specific tasks.
Coping With Transitioning to Remote Working
Many business owners and employees have struggled with the transition to remote working. However, when it’s done correctly, it can have a wide range of benefits.
Maintaining productivity is one of the most important things you need to ensure happens when your team is working remotely, and using the tips in this post, you’ll be able to ensure your team remains productive.
For more information on how to improve your business operations and marketing plan, read through the latest articles on the Intentionally Inspirational blog.
Written by Lewis James