Facetime in an office setting can be important so you understand if your employees are actually productive. Many businesses are using remote teams to streamline their business.
How do they know if somebody thousands of miles away from the office is actually working efficiently?
And it isn’t totally the fault of the workers. Managing time zones, scheduling meetings and other challenges can be barriers to getting everybody on the same page.
In this article, I will go over several ways to keep your remote workers productive through apps and other methods.
Use time tracker software
This might come off in the wrong way with your remote workers if not presented correctly. Using a time tracker might make them feel as if you don’t trust them to manage their own time.
After all, results are what matters most so if they are providing you with good results why do you need a time tracker app?
Well, it is necessary to see how they are using their time. You may find that even though they are producing good results, there is a more efficient way to use their time.
You may see a lot of repetitive tasks that can be done much better. Make sure they understand that you are not judging how they spend their time working, but that you are trying to streamline the workflow of the entire team.
The only way to do that is to see how your workers are overlapping their tasks and where bottlenecks in productivity are happening.
Use productivity apps
Having everybody using the same systems can go a long way towards having a productive team. Connect everybody to some productivity apps like Slack or Evernote.
This is not just a way to communicate with everybody across different time zones, but to also make sure that they are held accountable for their time.
Project management apps are also a great way to see what everybody is working on so you can coordinate all the different moving parts. An app like Trello can give you a lot of control over who is doing what and when so you can move people into different tasks when they need to come together with others.
Schedule check ins
Remote workers may love not commuting into an office everyday, but they don’t want to feel alone in the wilderness either.
Regular communication, when used well, is a good way to make sure they feel like they are part of a team. They will also understand how a project depends on their hard work to all come together. Having scheduled meetings will give everybody a chance to feel part of the team and give them a chance to express parts of the process they think could change to make the whole project more efficient.
The one thing to keep in mind is that too frequent check ins may actually be detrimental to productivity. You could end up micro managing them and that will kill any kind of productivity. Also, make sure each meeting has a theme that is communicated beforehand.
The workers will understand what they need to focus on for an effective meeting.
Praise and promote
When you are seeing good results from a remote worker, it is wise to heap praise upon them. Everybody likes to feel appreciated and letting them know their hard work has not gone unnoticed will go a long way towards continued productivity.
When there is a promotion to be had, make sure that it doesn’t always go to the office employees. Even remote workers can take on a more responsible role. For instance, if you are managing a remote IT team, then you can assign one of the programmers as a team leader with appropriate raise for the increase in responsibility. This will not only motivate the promoted worker, but will show the rest of the team that there are rewards for working hard.
Eliminate inefficiencies in the company
Your workers productivity can only be as good as your processes that you have in place. If you find that too many of your remote workers are not as productive as you would like, it is time to do an audit of your company workflow as a whole.
You might find after an efficiency audit that your programs themselves are wasteful and your employees are being hamstrung by your company. After the audit, follow the recommendations to eliminate waste and inefficiencies to give your workers what they need to succeed.