Working Remotely Best Practices for a Connected Team

Though, some business organizations have already been using the remote work culture to bring efficiency and effectiveness to their operations. But, the area of remote working was limited before - like one or two employees might be working remotely in the entire organization.

But, today, when each member of the team is working remotely, establishing coordination between them becomes a huge problem, especially in the big organizations, where a large number of people are working on the same. This problem of establishing a connection between the team has given birth to latency and low productivity. Thus, it is highly important for business organizations to create an effective roadmap for managing a remote team's best practices.

Remote Work Best Practices

This year has brought lots of changes in our lives, from social distancing to wearing masks - we have learned so much in 2020. But, if you want to effectively manage your WFH team in 2020, you have to learn the best practices to work remotely also. Without adequate work from home engagement activities, you can’t align the activities of your remote team and increase its efficiency. The perfect remote work best practices 2020 includes -

Limited Set of Tools

The foundation of remote working is technology and tools. Without the proper tools, you can’t effectively run your remote employees and operations. But, right now, there’s a wave of remote working tools available in the market to perform numerous activities. In this, when you swirl your employees in the whirlpool of different tools, you are creating an overwhelming and confusing environment for them.

For instance, to complete a remote operation, your team has to move from multiple apps. Your team needs a communication tool to connect with one another properly. Now, some communication tools provide audio calling facilities only and some texting. So, just to communicate properly, your team might need to use 2-3 different apps. That’s just for communication only, to complete other operations like scheduling, work allotment, assessment, and performance evaluation, you have to provide a series of different software.

This hopping from one software to another can truly confuse the employees and create a chaotic work environment. Thus, managing remote team best practices would be getting a compact remote working toolkit to effectively connect your team. When you have a TrackOlap managing remote workers toolkit with you, all the operations can be performed from a platform including communication, management, tracking, and so on. This way, you can create a simple and effective remote work environment for your team for better connectivity.

Keep your Team Organised

If your employees have a cluttered desk in the office, they won’t be able to perform properly and swiftly. Similarly, if your team has a cluttered remote desktop, they won’t be able to deliver the proficient services. Thus, working best practices remotely includes properly organizing your remote team.

You have to create a transparent remote work culture in your WFH culture so that your team knows how much work is completed and remaining. Moreover, when you have installed a dedicated remote work dashboard, team members can easily check which work is allotted to whom. Using the software, managers can keep the team organized in multiple ways -

You can set ground communication and work rules to create a transparent work environment.
A clear team structure can be designed by highlighting the roles and responsibilities of the employees.
Employees can easily engage with seniors and subordinates with a well-defined hierarchy.
Managers can know the work status of each team member independently to effectively control the individual employee's performance.
Through an integrated communication system, employees can easily conduct formal and informal work-related conversations.

Work on Trust Building

Trust is an essential building block in any successful team. And it’s directly linked to transparency and accountability. In the remote work system, various big corporate organizations are failing to build trust among their team, which is dramatically influencing the performance and productivity of the team.

With the managing remote workers' toolkit, you can develop a transparent and accountable work environment to build a trustworthy team. When you share all the information related to the business operations on the open platform and allot work as per the performance of employees, the feeling of favoritism and discrimination won’t ever enter into your team’s mind.

For example, when an automated performance evaluation system analyses the performance of individual team members based on real-time figures, the employees won’t question the judgment of managers. That’s because a report is generated by a machine, not humans, and machines always tell real facts and logic. Thus, when you share an automated performance report with your team, you are getting a step closer to make a trustworthy team.

Communication Is The Key

If you don’t want your remote team to fall under the bulldozer of miscommunication, you have to prepare a flawless system to improve the communication structure. When your team can’t reach you or other team members on time, it can put back work and delay the deliveries, which is very bad for your business in the current economic conditions.

The best practice for working from home teams would be equipping them with the centralized communication system where all team members are just one tap away from one another. With centralized communication software, you can send personalized messages to each team member or broadcast a message so that everyone can stay updated. Moreover, your employees can contact you anytime in case of urgency. The instant push notifications will alert your entire team at the same time so that you can easily communicate.

Apart from the miscommunication, half communication is very dangerous for the remote working teams, which can create conflicts between team members and management. Thus, when the entire communication flow is recorded, the conflicts and confusion can be cleared easily. So, if you want to increase connectivity of your remote team, you have to simply define rules communication around following principles -

Define communication timing and responding back time. Use a dedicated communication platform to avoid confusion. Share documents, files, and other information through a secured communication platform only. Be mindful of your tone when writing your message. Keep the message clear and interactive as much as possible.

Define the Roles and Responsibilities Clearly

If you want to ensure that your remote team is adhering to the work assigned to them, you have to make sure that each team is fully aware of the job role. You have to make a proper planner where weekly or monthly responsibilities of each team member are recorded along with the person whom they should report.

With the systematic remote working tool, you can assign work to the competent team members and monitor their performance for a better outcome. Moreover, if you found that a person is delaying work or won’t able to submit on time, you can assign work to the employee who has already completed his or her work.

It is very useful when a team member has to take urgent work; other team members can pick up his slack. This way, a harmonious and trusted environment in the organization can be established. Thus, the best solution to develop a remotely connected team would be clearly defining the roles and responsibilities of each individual working in the team.

Run a Mentorship Program

Your team has been trained and programmed to work from the office. Thus, they can’t adjust to the new work from the home system without extensive training, especially your older employees who have never used all the new technologies and tools. This change in work culture, along with the stress of pandemic, can easily overwhelm your employees and influence their productivity.

Thus, you have to craft a mentorship program where you have to teach your employees how to effectively work from their home and use the customized remote working platform. When you get the customized desktop monitoring software for your organization, the software providing company will provide a free demo to your team and even show them how to effectively use the platform. It will eventually reduce your burden and enhance the productivity of your team. This will ease the burden of your team.

Connectivity is Crucial

In the earlier normal, your employees use to connect over a cup of coffee in the lunch break and brainstorm new strategies, but now, they haven’t met each other personally in 5 months. This distance has changed the mindset of your team and drifted them apart, which isn’t good for the productivity of your business. Thus, you have to adopt the right tools and ideology to create a sustainable virtual environment for your team to work effortlessly.

TrackOlap can be your remote work partner to keep your team fully connected. You can book your free demo today and keep your team productive remotely.