The Covid-19 pandemic may soon be a thing of the past but work from home is here to stay. Namely, research shows that 90% of employees feel that they’re more productive while working remotely, while an astonishing 99% want to continue working from home until their career ends.
These numbers aren’t surprising knowing that remote work offers flexibility and autonomy employees rarely experience in the office. Furthermore, when working remotely, employees can make a subtle balance between their private and work life, having more time to spend with their loved ones.
If you’re one of those business owners who are tackling the idea of embracing fully remote models to meet your employees’ demands, keep reading. You’ll find several significant factors you need to consider when managing fully remote teams.
Reliable Technology
Whatever line of business you may be in, one of the greatest challenges you’ll face when transferring to fully remote management is ensuring seamless workflow and communication between your team members.
Fortunately, there is an array of remarkable digital tools that will help you optimize your business processes, ensure straightforward communication and maintain high employee performance.
This said you can use Slack or Zoom to communicate or host meetings with your teams, keep a close eye on your project development via Trello and Asana. And if you want to help your remote employees stay highly productive and time-efficient you can start tracking work from home employees and gain a complete insight into their daily activities.
Advanced technology can help you bridge communication gaps and avoid serious pitfalls that may endanger your projects’ success. It also helps you keep track of your employees’ performance, reward hard workers and offer support and guidance to those who may struggle with specific tasks.
Specific Meeting Guidelines
Hosting or attending meetings when working from home may be a draining and even frustrating experience due to poor connection or other technical issues that may pop up unexpectedly.
Furthermore, lengthy team meetings without specific topics that need to be discussed may distract your team from ongoing tasks and projects, causing their productivity to plummet.
Before you decide to schedule several weekly meetings at once, ask yourself whether the topics that you want to discuss are important enough to deserve a team meeting, or you can convey your message via email.
Also, when you’re in the team meeting, try to stick to the list of topics you’ve agreed upon, making sure that the discussion remains concise without time-wasting digressions.
Finally, create communication guidelines, defining what topics will be discussed at team meetings or video conferences, via email, or on the company’s chat.
By doing this, you’ll achieve seamless communication with your remote team members and avoid misunderstandings or misinterpretations.
Focus on Major Goals
Micromanagement is outdated and despised practice. Although it’s reasonable to worry about employees’ performance when they work out of your sight, try not to hover over their heads, checking their progress continually. This may be counterproductive because your employees will feel pressured and unmotivated to finish their work.
Instead of focusing on short-term tasks that need to be completed and pressuring your employees to meet set deadlines, try to shift your focus on major company’s goals. By discussing significant goals that lay ahead of you, you may create an optimistic outlook on your company’s future, showing your employees that their contribution is important.
