Remote working- which seemed a distant idea is very much a reality today. The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged thousands of companies around the world to transition to remote working real quick. Though remote working is not a new concept, professionals used to work from home now and then, but not at the scale it’s happening today.
Fast track 2021, over 67% of the workforce is working from home. With that comes the huge responsibility of effectively managing the remote teams and thus the need for real-time review software that can report back on engagement and productivity. The implementation of remote working is far deeper and broader than most businesses realize. The pandemic-induced remote working is not temporary. It continues to become the new normal and a big part of our lives.
In this article
What are the Challenges Involved with Working Remotely?
Unplugging
One of the most prevalent challenges of remote working is to ensure teamwork and productivity. According to a study, thousands of employers and employees welcomed remote working and transitioned to it smoothly. However, they end up facing an array of serious challenges. One being ‘Unplugging’ from work. Work from home has blurred the boundaries between the professional and personal lives of professionals. The unconventional hours have made it difficult for people to separate work from their leisure time.
Hampered Social- Work-Life at Work
Moving from traditional office settings to working remotely has cast a huge impact on the social work aspect of professionals. Remote working is a lonely experience. With no in-person coffee breaks, group lunches, or team activities, remote work has significantly hampered peer-to-peer interaction, bonding, and connection building. Loneliness directly impacts employee performance and productivity as there is little or no sense of belonging.
Ensuring ample engagement and teamwork online is a big challenge that managers must cater to! In a world where 99.8% of the IT workforce is struggling to work from home, businesses must come up with better WFH policies to keep employees engaged, empowered, and not go out of business. Consciously planned off-time activities such as virtual coffees or yoga sessions can help employees interact with their peers and stay motivated.
Fear of Missing Out
Another major challenge that employers encounter with remote working is preventing fear of missing out on employees. With scales of employees working from home, it has become harder for companies to notice the good work, provide feedback, and reward employees. Apart from emotional isolation, remote work is also causing opportunity isolation in employees.
Today, only 29% of employees feel that their managers have acknowledged the hard work in the last 6 months of working remotely. Thus, remote working is making it difficult for employees to receive recognition and keep up with career progression & promotions. It is an onerous job for managers to provide employees with a purpose and zest to work remotely!
Let’s move ahead and explore different ways that can help companies improve the remote work experience and promote teamwork at home.
1. Ensure Your Employees Have The Right Tools
1. Ensure Your Employees Have The Right Tools
In order for remote teams to succeed, companies must ensure that employees have all the right tools at their disposal. Firstly, this involves ensuring that all employees have a reliable internet connection, through a provider such as earthlink internet, so that they can work effectively and efficiently from home. Then, each employee must be geared with the right work setup. For instance, ergonomic chairs, tables, office equipment such as webcams, and headphones must be provided; so that your teams can attend virtual meetings and participate in daily activities and achieve business goals seamlessly.
Good remote working tools significantly reduce the overhead, add more flexibility to the workflow, and bring out responsiveness. Popular tools such as Slack (Messaging tool), Zapier (Apps and Services Automation tool), SlideModel (Presentation tool) are highly effective in boosting working endeavors for remote teams.
2. Invest in Collaborative Platforms
For any team working remotely, effective collaboration is a must! Smooth communication & access to company resources is critical for business success. For instance, rather than downloading and sharing several copies of the same document between multiple members, companies can invest in smart cloud-based solutions and aid day to day working of remote teams. Utilizing professional PowerPoint templates for presentations can also significantly enhance communication and engagement during virtual meetings.
Collaborative platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Business Suite and more, ensure that all files and communication are secured, up to date and everyone has access to the latest version of the work. Not just that, companies can keep their documents safe and provide controlled access to the resources via collaborative platforms.
3. Clear, Well-Communicated Online Meetings
Just imagine, you have been talking for 10 minutes straight into your daily scrum. You look over the faces of your peers, all look disengaged, distracted or bored. Virtual meetings are becoming the new normal. Not a day goes by when we don’t attend a meeting while working from home. One should understand that online meetings carry a prevailing pain point, since it’s not an in-person interaction, it becomes difficult for employees to stay focused and not lose track of the goals.
Distributed teams often have a hard time fostering good working relationships through online meetings. A study finds that over 91% of attendees admitted to daydreaming during the virtual meeting. So, how do we make meetings and presentations fun? Use professional PowerPoint templates! Ready to use PowerPoint templates help you come up with presentations that minimize distractions, present information lucidly, and conclude with clear action items.
A good online meeting is more about boosting the understanding of the participants while engaging with them to the fullest.
4. Streamline The Existing Setup
Project deadlines and deliverables can easily fall into cracks when team interactions are scattered across multiple platforms. When it comes to promoting teamwork in remote teams, the process starts with streamlining your systems. Often companies leverage different platforms for communicating, storing files, maintaining records, and other daily tasks.
The practice adds redundancy to the workflow and exhausts your resources. Embracing smart technological solutions at this point can help teams in eliminating understanding gaps, reduce workflow redundancy and cater better to project deliverables.
5. Establish a Clear Work Routine
One of the biggest hassles people face with a remote work setup is blurry working hours. Managers should provide a structured and clear work schedule that can motivate the employees to get the work done on time. Just like regular office hours, a WFH-friendly schedule can provide clear deadlines and convey the right expectations to the employees.
Not just that, having a clear work schedule in practice can help employees preserve their work-life balance. The goal is to maintain a good employee sentiment. It is only then that companies can foster good collaboration between peers.
6. Track How Teams Spend Time
Another vital aspect of effective remote working is tracking how employees spend their time. Since teams are scattered and working remotely, it becomes difficult to monitor what they are working on and for how long. For any organization, knowing how much time your teams are spending on projects is critical from a billing and management perspective.
You can leverage an array of work tracking tools to address this issue. You can promote teamwork and make employees accountable for the time spent through automated productivity trackers. Thus, companies can identify gaps in understanding, reduce time wastage and encourage employees to get the work done in desired time.
7. Establish a Feedback Mechanism
For organizations of all scales, providing feedback has become an integral part be it in-person or remote. Feedback holds a special place in remote work setups. The practice helps in putting checks and balances and makes up for lost one-to-one human interaction. Team leaders and managers must foster an environment of regular feedback and encourage team members to provide their inputs around the clock.
It is regular feedback that helps the management stay in touch with teams on a granular level, find gaps, improve quality of work and further enhance productivity. Managers can introduce regular check-ins, progress reports, daily follow-ups in their business workflow. Through regular feedback, management can instill a feeling of belongingness in the employees. When employees feel more connected with the company and its goals, they tend to put more effort into accomplishing the business goals.
8. Provide Emotional Support
As mentioned earlier, working from home for a prolonged period of time can contribute to loneliness. Employers must render steady emotional support to employees. Managers can start by being more available than usual for the team members.
The use of instant messaging apps should be encouraged so that employees can reach the management and their peers instantly. Moreover, Human Resource departments can advocate for remote employees to stay fit, get ample sleep, exercise and continue to spend quality time with their families.
Wrapping It Up
The pandemic has made companies of all scales adopt remote working. Now the companies can actually make ‘remote’ work and foster a solid remote company culture when the work is visible, regulated, engaging & due recognition is given. Companies need to track team hours, capacity, and activity to keep remote working fun and lead happier, healthier teams.
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