Remote working has become very important in recent months ad the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold and more businesses have been forced to ask their employees to work from home.
A lot of companies were reluctant to offer working from home to their staff thinking it would reduce productivity amongst other things, but may have been pleasantly surprised by the results overall, although there have been some issues to contend with.
If you are thinking about letting your employees work from home more often going forward, there are a few common remote work challenges that you will want to conquer first…
Project management
One of the biggest challenges of remote working is the challenge of managing a project when your team is scattered all over the place. Luckily, there are a lot of tools that can make this a whole lot easier. From Evernote that allows you to sync and share notes in the cloud to Asana that enables you to control document permissions, create dedicated team pages, and communicate more effectively online. Use them and it will be just as easy as working from the office most of the time.
Dropped connections
Dropped connections are the bane of the remote worker’s life, and they can make it more difficult for you to conduct your business as effectively as possible. It’s a nightmare when half of your employees disappear during a video call or when your IT infrastructure fails and no one can log on to work at all, but one thing that can really help with this is investing in high-quality structured cabling services and telephone systems like those offered by JabberComm, which will help to keep the lines of communication open. You may also need to invest in more modern software and hardware, so having a consultation with an IT professional may also be of use.
Tracking productivity
Tracking the productivity of your remote teams isn’t as easy when they’re all spread out in different locations, but again, there are tools that can help you do that more effectively. Status Hero is a prime example. This meat piece of software prompts your employees to get in touch, check-in, share a bit about what they’re doing, and how they’re proceeding with any given task and allows other employees to see this information too. This helps to keep everyone informed, and if you notice someone is behind, it gives you the opportunity to spur them on.
People working at different times
Depending on the nature of your business, this may not be an issue at all, but if you need employees to collaborate a lot, it could definitely affect how well you all get your work done. Luckily, the easiest solution for this particular problem is to try and impose guidelines for working hours. Impose core hours when everyone must be online, and schedule any collaborative tasks for that time, then employees can put in the rest of thewir working hours when it suits. You could also use Google Calendars to schedule important online times so employees always know what’s expected of them.
Remote working is not without its challenges, but as you can see, those challenges are not insurmountable.
