Working from home has become the new normal in the last two years. However, staying focused in a remote setting can be difficult; constantly observing the screen can also lead to fatigue. So, the most challenging aspect of remote work as a business owner is to ensure productivity in your team. Many factors, including communication patterns, work culture, and employee morale, can affect your company’s productivity.
Here, we have curated a list of tips and strategies from 20 experts to help you increase your remote team’s productivity:
Brian Minick, ZeroBounce
My tip would be to not attempt to micromanage remote workers. Doing so will cause a few issues. One of them is that they will never get comfortable taking care of things on their own. They’ll always rely on you. Also, they’re going to feel pressure, and that’s not going to boost their productivity.
Respect their time. Most people working remote are working longer hours. So what if they went to run an errand, did that affect a customer? If not, then stop micromanaging their time. If a customer did get impacted, help with a plan to fix it in the future.
If you can learn to let your remote employees do their thing, you will learn that the location of their desk means nothing. We support our team members by allowing them to work remotely and travel and continue to work from that location, as well. The outcome we have seen is happier employees and the same great productive work.
Brian Minick, Chief Operating Officer at ZeroBounce
Megan Mosley, Referral Rock
The easiest way to keep productivity high and tasks on track is to have good communication and organization. One way to manage this is to use a project management app. We use Asana, and it’s great for projects of all calibers.
Sometimes, it acts as a quick checklist, but it also has served as many project boards with multiple people and moving parts involved. So when you have a huge project due, but it relies on the whole team, everyone has a space to track all components of it and contribute when needed. Whether that be a comment, asking a question, or sharing a file – everyone (or those for who the project is relevant) is in the space to keep things on track.
Your team can be spread all over the world, but you’re all in one place seeing the same thing and moving forward together.
Ammara Tariq, Chanty
How can you make sure your team remains productive when they are part of a virtual team and you are unable to go to their workstation to monitor them? Give your employees more freedom.
You could be tempted to continually review your employees on the status of their job given that employees are working remotely. The last thing you want to do is keep a constant eye on them.
Instead, you need to modernize your management approach by strengthening your relationship with your team and allowing them more freedom. In fact, workplaces where workers have more freedom to accomplish their work report higher levels of job satisfaction. More autonomy at work is something that employees want because it increases productivity.
Miklós Kovács, OptiMonk
I would recommend you to have daily standups and week starter meetings and use Slack as an instant communication tool. Also, plan ahead and have a quarterly planning with strict OKR-s and measurable goals. Plan your 2 week sprint ahead with your team and try to estimate the time that each task will need. The best project management software for tracking the tasks is ClickUp, it worked well for us.
Addison Goff, Hive
At Hive, we are a fully remote organization with employees located across the world. One of the most impactful ways my team maximizes productivity is by being strategic with the meetings we schedule, making sure each and every meeting is necessary and will actually help us progress with a given project.
We all know that Zoom meetings are great for staying connected, but they are also a really easy way to waste time and keep people from working on other, more pressing items. I would be willing to bet that everyone knows the feeling of sitting in a virtual meeting, wishing you could be responding to emails or working on another project instead.
So long story short: if you don’t actually need a meeting, or if you could send a simple message instead of taking up an hour of your day, don’t be afraid to skip the Zoom call this time.
Tenny Jesse, Pearl Lemon Group
Employee isolation is one of the most common pitfalls in a remote team. Sensible use of technology to streamline communications and workflows by automating and constantly optimising the processes involved not only saves time and resources spent on daily tasks, but it also reduces cognitive burden on employees, leading to improved performance.
In addition to the benefits outlined above, the analytics presented by automation technologies facilitate tracking of KPIs, making it possible to set performance benchmarks, which may subsequently be gamified to create a competitive setting among staff and enhance productivity.