In the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations now allow their employees to work from home. However, suppose you are supervising a remote workforce. In that case, you may have to change and adapt to some appropriate and suitable approaches in the office environment. Follow these below tips that will help to improve coordination and boost your remote team’s productivity.
Use a Collaboration Platform
Effective communication and collaboration are convenient when teammates are working in the same office space. Text messages, phone calls, and emails can be sufficient to maintain contact and keep everybody engaged and updated. But when the teammates are dispersed around several places and working from remote locations, managing projects and coordination between workforce becomes a little complicated.
An online collaboration platform is helpful to manage your remote workforce. You can quickly and effectively track work progress, connect with teammates, maintain work schedules, and ask for responses from the same platform.
Conduct Virtual Meetings
While many organizations now allow their employees to work from home, remote employees may feel detached from teammates. Virtual meetings could be a perfect solution to keep everyone together. Using a video conferencing platform will make remote employees feel more connected by allowing them to see and interact with their teammates. They can also share work progress or seek input and guidance from their peers.
Check our blog post on Keeping meeting participants engaged and interested to find some more tips and make your remote work more productive. This can also help to improve remote team’ s productivity.
Daily check-in meeting
It is often difficult to monitor your team members’ progress and performance while working remotely. Although remote work management is essential, it is also necessary to find an alternative to watch the team’s activities without administering them at the micro-level. Checking in with your team daily could be an easy way to keep track of their work progress, assign tasks, and provide guidance as required.
Restructure and reschedule
You may need to restructure some existing processes if your workforce is working from a remote location or outside the office for the first time. Some approaches and practices may not be appropriate and suitable while working outside the office environment. Take feedback from your teammates to restructure some of your existing work processes to adjust to this new working norm. Being ready to restructure and reschedule some daily work processes will boost your team’s productivity.
Maximize Your Mornings
You may prioritize and allocate essential tasks in the morning as it leaves the rest of the day to finish tasks. Although your team members aren’t going to the office, encourage them to adopt a work-oriented approach at the beginning of the day and start working at regular office times. You can accomplish this by holding a routine check-in meeting in the morning to discuss work progress, assign a new task or provide feedback to the team. Also, try to maintain a daily work schedule and adhere to it as much as possible for a productive day ahead.
Maintain communication
Commonly, our mind may seek any excuse to delay performing the assigned tasks and enjoy relaxation when working remotely where there is no physical supervision. To overcome this problem, keep in touch with your team members. You can create a chatroom or group on a social platform where everyone can discuss work progress, share updates or chat casually to feel socially connected. This not only encourages your team’s productivity but keeps them accountable, and they will feel more obligated to accomplish tasks on time.
Use screen sharing tools
While employees are working remotely from a different location, it’s often challenging to discuss project details through phone calls and emails, particularly if it is associated with visualizations of data, PowerPoint presentations, graphic designs, etc. Screen sharing tools are helpful in this case. When you are discussing something complex in nature, sharing your screen allows all your teammates to see the materials being discussed and to participate in the conversation. Thus, it speeds up decision-making and improves productivity while everyone is working from different locations.
Send well-defined meeting agenda and notes
While online meetings and video conferences have become the standard for most organizations as offices are spread around various locations, it is essential to keep everyone aware of the agenda so that participants feel engaged and interested, as well as make the meetings more productive. A pre-determined and specific agenda is essential to keep participants involved in the discussion. Share the agenda with the participants before the meeting so that everyone is aware of their responsibilities and can respond accordingly. After the meeting, send a brief meeting note to everyone that summarizes decisions, instructions, and anticipated timelines, which is more meaningful and effective than comprehensive meeting minutes.
Every team of an organization is different. So, the management approach may need to be different and unique to boost the productivity of a remote workforce. Also, you need to be innovative and take feedback to restructure and reschedule some work processes that will improve remote team’s productivity.
