Many people don’t realize this, but working at home as a member of a remote working team can actually create a situation for greater productivity. For some reason, most people are convinced that they will suffer from distraction after distraction while working from home, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, remote workers have advantages that you might not have ever considered. As an example, how many of your coworkers or employees do you see gossiping around the water cooler? Or how often do you see them talking to one another at their desks?
When working from home, you aren’t going to have coworkers there to distract you. You’ll be able to stay focused on your work, perform your tasks without too many distractions, and get the job done much quicker.
This is just one productivity benefit to working remotely. Now we’ll take a moment to share productivity hacks for your remote team to make the entire operation run as smoothly as possible.
1. Generating Weekly Progress Reports
As a manager or business owner, you’ll want to make sure each one of your remote workers is staying on task. A simple way to do this is to ask them about their productivity once a week and use this information to generate a report.
Believe it or not, this will definitely aid in productivity. You can use the information gathered from these reports to make suggestions to help remote workers become more productive if they are struggling.
Some questions to ask them to include:
- What have you accomplished during the week?
- Are you still working on a project?
- Is there any way I can help speed up production?
While you’re at it, you can have remote employees “clock in” and “clock out” using a time tracking apps like the one found at https://www.clockspot.com/. By setting up this system, you’ll know exactly when your remote employees say they are working. You can use this information to determine if they meet your expectations based on the hours you’re expected to pay them for.
2. Set up a Dedicated Chat Channel for Your Remote Working Team
In many cases, effective communication between remote workers will be critical to the success of your project. If you do not have an easy way for your team to communicate with one another, your project will ultimately suffer and possibly fail.
So instead of expecting your team to figure out how to communicate with one another effectively, you should set up a dedicated chat channel using software like Slack to give them a central meeting place to contact one another. By having this chat channel open all the time, remote workers can quickly send messages to the group or individually and get the answers they need very quickly to move forward with their portion of the project.
3. Create a Wiki for Your Team
You may not realize this at first when you begin hiring remote workers, but you’re going to have certain standards for productivity that you’ll want your team to follow. By setting up an online wiki, you’ll basically create an encyclopedia that your team members can go to when they have questions that need to be answered.
One option is to skip the wiki and have to repeatedly answer the same questions over and over again as you remove and replace members of your team. Or, you can do the smart thing and create this living document and publish it on the web.
In your wiki, you can address certain areas like meeting notes, team bios, standards and practices, expected procedures, how to’s, and important documents. By having this wiki in place, your team can access this information whenever it’s needed without having to bother you or ask the same questions repeatedly.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, it’s possible for remote teams to get off track and have their productivity suffer. But you can use the guidelines we’ve shared today to keep your team running smoothly and productively without too many unexpected hiccups along the way.