Tips for Boosting Productivity While Working Remote
It’s undeniable that working remotely presents new challenges that society just hasn’t gotten used to yet. One of these new obstacles is that productivity may decrease when transferring to remote work. However, there are ways to boost office productivity for remote teams that can potentially make a team just as productive remote as in the office. Here are the top 5 ways:
- Avoid micromanaging
Micromanaging is bad in normal circumstances, but it gets even worse online. Employees become resentful and less productive when over-managed and when remote, this effect gets magnified. Even worse, it takes more time to do it remotely, so it wastes both your time and theirs. The time that could be used on projects may be spent on explaining work, which is obviously less efficient.
- Encourage creating the right environments
Office buildings are often designed to facilitate work. Home environments, however, are rarely designed with this function in mind. Instead, homes are typically focused on relaxing and therefore, can add additional distractions for employees to deal with. To combat this, management should send tips on how to create the proper home office and follow them as well.
- Use analytic tools
There are all sorts of tools that can analyze the contributions of an employee. Whether it is analyzing emails sent, time spent on assignments, or deadlines met, there are literally thousands of tools at your disposal. If employees know that they’re being tracked, a few may try to game the system, but the majority will work harder because of it.
- Use the proper tools
Communication tools like Slack and Zoom are great for remote work. This comes as no surprise as these tools have been in the news for a while now. These tools have to be used correctly, so every employee would benefit by being properly trained in them.
- Don’t rely on conference calls too much
Finally, many companies are overdoing the conference calls with remote work. The number of conference calls should not exceed the number of meetings that employees used to have before going remote. Conference calls are less productive than employees working on their assignments, so managers in charge of employees working remotely should limit the number of them.
Originally published on Thomas Looby’s website.