Angeli is the Founder and COO at Workast. Her team ensures our users have an exceptional customer experience with Workast and takes care of all user issues.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, more businesses are adopting a remote work culture. While remote work options may appeal to team leaders and team members, most team leaders are often concerned that their team members will not get anything done and will misuse their time when working remotely. In this article, we will explore various ways to maximize the productivity of remote workers.
When everyone is working remotely, it may be difficult for a team to operate like a traditional office. It may be harder to keep track of and monitor the remote team’s productivity levels. So, your remote team’s success depends on your faith in them. You believe in the skills and expertise of the people on your team, which is why you have chosen to work with them. Let them prove it. Giving remote workers more autonomy in their work directly influences their job satisfaction and feeling of success.
Instead of checking in frequently, create a routine focusing on objectives, deadlines, and updates. This keeps your workers on track with their tasks and removes any possible distractions. The more autonomy and choice they have in their job, the better they will perform. This is because they can concentrate on the topic since they are rarely supervised.
Provide Your Team Members with the Essential Tools and Resources for Working Remotely
To manage a remote team, you must equip your team members with everything necessary to ensure a seamless remote working process. Remote teams depend largely on technology to help them collaborate and be more productive. So, you should ensure they have the right technology to foster seamless collaboration and enhance productivity.
Instruct your team members on how to make the most of the remote working resources you have made accessible. These resources include communication channels, such as IM, email, video calls, and so on. They also allow for effective measurement of progress toward the team’s goals.
The best bet is to make a prioritized list of everything your remote team members require and provide it for them. Making these essential tools available will have a major impact since it will enable them to become much more productive.
It is always easier for remote workers to find themselves working from about every corner of the room, and this often increases the risk of being easily distracted during work hours. Even though the concept of working from home seems liberating, productivity often suffers if proper care is not taken.
However, remote team members will feel more in control of how they plan and execute their daily tasks if they have a dedicated workspace in their homes. A dedicated workspace also enables workers to maintain a healthy work-life balance. It can also help team members deliver their daily tasks on time.
You can encourage your team members to get a dedicated workspace by providing an incentive payment to cover the cost of a desk, chair, and other office equipment. Overall, the mental and physical separation that having a dedicated workspace offers is essential to boosting the productivity of your team members to a great extent.
Remote employees are more likely than their in-office colleagues to suffer burnout. Make sure your team members are working during their work hours, and have them keep a time record at the workplace. It would be best to prioritize avoiding overworking your remote workers for the same reasons you wouldn't do it with team members working from the office.
You can utilize several strategies to motivate your employees to take personal responsibility for their health. Start by encouraging them to participate in a mental health workshop or seminar. Your teams will better handle stress if they care for their physical and mental health.
A fitness challenge inside the workplace is another fantastic technique to promote physical health and well-being. Your remote team members can work collaboratively to establish weekly and monthly fitness goals. Mutual support and an opportunity to share their achievements with each other will ensure that they stay on track. You can reward them with free gym memberships from a popular gym to encourage them to keep up their fitness routine or connect them with a professional gym instructor.
Leadar will assist you in finding an occupational psychologist, nutritionist, or gym instructor for your team so as to organize employee wellness activities. It is left to you to decide what strategy works best for you and your team members. Remember that the good physical and mental health of your team members is a great booster to their productivity; the better they feel mentally and physically, the better they can get their work done.
Maintaining productivity benefits both team members and team leaders. However, retaining a social fabric in the remote working culture is also important, as it helps keep teams together.
Holding weekly team socials and calls where workers can talk about anything other than work is a terrific approach to keeping everyone on the same page and maintaining a healthy working relationship. Also, virtual group lunches or after-work Zoom hangouts are excellent methods to promote off-topic conversation and foster connections among team members. Occasionally, you can organize a virtual live casino or visit the cinema to watch the latest blockbuster films with your remote team members.
Participating in these activities outside of work may aid in employee bonding and getting to know one another. Such bonds help to build teams and increase workplace cooperation. Teams with members who already know each other outperform those whose members are unfamiliar with each other.
Being the leader of a remote team is a lot of work, and it often comes with its fair share of challenges. But if well handled, remote work can prove to be very productive. So everything boils down to determining and correcting what delays production before it becomes problematic. Under the appropriate conditions, nothing beats a remote worker or remote team in terms of performance.
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