Remotes teams have become a reality of today’s time. The reason is simple – they offer many benefits over in-house employees. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to worry about getting a bigger office space when you have employed remote teams. Your expense on overheads such as office equipment and rent go down significantly.
Though having a remote team is a smart idea, you cannot leave your remote team to its own and expect it to be super productive. My friend, remote teams are very prone to going south of their productivity curve, unless worked upon raising their productivity.
Therefore, it’s very important for you to effectively manage your remote team and work toward increasing productivity.
Following are the seven proven strategies to increase the productivity of your remote team:
1- Use team collaboration tools
The biggest challenge remote teams can face is that the horizontal and vertical communication in the organization is not as direct as it would be in a traditional office setup.
How can a team possibly accomplish a task without proper communication?
Here are some efficient collaboration tools:
Slack: It’s a real-time messaging and voice-calling app built especially for small remote teams. This tool is quite revolutionary as its lightweight and localized.
Zoom: This tool is priced steeply when we compare it to Slack but it also has video conferencing feature that differentiates it from Slack.
Loom: People like Loom because of its simplicity. It can be added as an extension to chrome and the team can start recording and sharing screens right away.
2- Streamline process
The absence of a defined work distribution process not only creates confusion among team members but also affects the productivity of a remote team.
There should be a structured approach to the distribution of work, and everyone in the team must have a clear-cut idea of:
- Who they have to take the work from
- Who they have to report to
- How they need to keep track of their output.
When there is a structural process, everyone knows what they are supposed to do, how they are supposed to do it, and whom they have to inform.
3- Instil competition
Needless to say, a healthy competition can motivate employees to give their best in what they do to achieve results. According to an article published in the Harvard Business Review, “Competition increases physiological and psychological activation, which prepares body and mind for increased effort and enables higher performance.”
Therefore, you should try to instill competition in your remote team to boost productivity. Sharing weekly/monthly performance report with your team, choosing a remote employee of the month, and rewarding top performers are some ways to do it.
4- Track time
When the workforce operates remotely, things may sometimes get a little out-of-hand if they lose track of time allotted for the completion of a specific job. There are time management tools specifically designed for remote teams such as:
Time Doctor: It’s arguably the one of the popular time management tools that sends real-time employee monitoring reports and reminders for unfinished tasks.
Paymo: It is used more by the small or medium sized businesses and less by large corporations.
5- Give constructive feedback
In remote teams, the managers are not in touch with the entire team. So the element of feedback can get overlooked sometimes, which can take a toll on the productivity of your remote team.
You should develop a culture of giving constructive feedback. Here are some ways to do it:
- Fix a time for 1-on-1s each week/month
- Create a positive feedback habit
- Set up regular feedback moments
- Email a written follow-up
Constructive feedback, if given regularly, will not only enhance the productivity of your remote team but also promote a healthy work culture.
6- Motivate your team
Remote team members don’t interact with you face-to-face and they don’t have any colleague to have a coffee break with. So, sometimes, they can feel isolated, which can affect their productivity.
You need to keep an open communication channel all the time and motivate your remote team regularly so that they don’t feel isolated. Implementing weekly/monthly rewards and recognition, eliminating dissatisfaction, promoting performers, and gamifying work are some proven methods to motivate your remote team.
7- Sharpen their skills
As rightly said by Mr. Abraham Lincoln,
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”
Judicious investment done to enhance the work skills of your remote team will pay you in the long run. Trained and updated employees do more in lesser time. Encourage the team members to keep updating themselves with online or offline courses and workshops. Trying to support this with an apt reward system is a good way to motivate your remote team members to upgrade their skills.
What about you? Do you want to share any tip to boost the productivity of your remote team? Please leave it in the comment section. I’d love to know about it.