Whether you have always been flexible with workplaces and work styles or you were forced to adopt this working model overnight in 2020, remote working can be a challenging model for any company to maintain. When your teams are scattered across different locations, communication can come to a halt and motivation can run low if the right processes aren’t set in place. But as every leader knows that productivity is the key driver of business success, you might be looking at ways to improve the overall efficiency of your remote teams in the following year, leading to higher prosperity in 2022. If that is the case, here are some effective methods that might help:
Establish good communication channels
Communicating with your team might prove to be difficult when you’re all working from different places. In an effort to overcome this issue, instant or online messaging tools can be of great help. For instance, you could choose a special team messaging application such as Slack or even opt for a more traditional solution like creating a work WhatsApp group. No matter which option you select, enabling your remote team to communicate quickly and easily update each other through instant messages will be key to increasing efficiency. This will provide a clear, fast, and functional channel of communication that can significantly improve employee productivity when working remotely, especially when compared to more traditional forms of communication.
Choose video conferencing platforms
While most of the communication between you and your remote team will have to be online, messaging applications alone won’t be enough for increasing morale and boosting efficiency. You will also need to maintain the conventional aspects of employer-employee relationships you likely practised in the physical office as well, such as holding team meetings, group reviews, and one-on-one conversations. The best way to achieve this with a remote team is by using video conferencing platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. These applications will provide you with all the tools you need for efficiently communicating with your remote teams, offering valuable insights, and maintaining good professional relationships in order to increase overall productivity among your employees.
Improve your contact sharing tactics
In an effort to boost productivity in a more specific and practical manner, there are a number of different tools and add-ons your remote teams could utilize as well. If you use Google Contacts as your primary contact management application, for instance, you could easily Share Google Contacts with a handy tool like Shared Contacts for Gmail. This solution will allow you to create a clean and organized contact base you could easily access from anywhere and at any time, making it perfect for remote teams. What’s more, this tool will also enable you and your team to effortlessly update, comment on, and share your contacts, thus helping to improve collaboration between team members and increase overall productivity.
Use goal-setting as a motivational tool
Similar to finding motivation in our personal lives, setting specific and realistic goals can allow companies to improve employee performance as well. As there’s not much room for inspiration when business processes are in constant turmoil, common goals can help to create an environment that breeds innovation and growth, allowing all team members to stay motivated and productive until they reach the desired target. But in order to achieve the best results, business goals have to be set intentionally, ensuring they are clear, attainable, easily measurable, relevant to your overall objectives, as well as having a specific deadline for completion that might encourage further motivation and some healthy competition.
Offer valuable insights and feedback
Wanting your remote team to be more productive and efficient means they need to have the opportunities to grow, evolve, and improve. Employee feedback is essential in this aspect, not only helping to increase motivation and improve performance, but also raising employee happiness and retention. For this reason, it might be wise to use performance tracking tools in order to monitor and evaluate the productivity of your employees. Then, utilize this data to pinpoint individual strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement, and convey them to your employees through video calls. This feedback will allow you to show empathy and care, while simultaneously boosting employee efficiency as well.
Aim to be more patient and flexible
Remote working has presented quite an abrupt change for many employees, particularly those who have never worked outside of an office or another traditional workplace setting. Some needed to learn how to use new technologies and conduct virtual meetings, while others had to adjust their work-life balance to this new and unexpected situation. In any case, it requires plenty of patience and flexibility for raising employee morale and increasing productivity during such a sudden lifestyle shift. To that end, make sure to provide your remote teams with all the tools, training, and support they need to perform their jobs more easily and more efficiently in the months to come.
Remote working isn’t a simple model for any business to maintain, but it might prove to be even more difficult if you were forced to make a sudden switch during 2020. Fortunately, there are a number of ways you could increase motivation and productivity among your employees, even when working remotely, hopefully leading to higher success and prosperity come 2022.