Remote work is a great way to get work done quickly and effectively. In fact, remote workers are more productive than their office counterparts. However, this is only true if you put in the effort to improve your business’ ability to handle remote work.
How Businesses Can Keep Their Remote Workforce Effective
An effective remote workforce doesn’t just happen overnight. Especially with all the distractions and difficulty that you and your workers will have working from home. Oftentimes a remote workforce will be far less effective than an onsite one due to these distractions. However, there are a few great methods that not only make sure that your workers aren’t distracted but also improve your workers’ productivity.
Keep Your Workers Connected
One of the most important things to consider when remote working, is how connected your workers are with each other. Communication is the key to get things done effectively. So you need to ensure that you and your workers have an effective channel to communicate on. These can come in the form of emails, voice calls, video calls, and instant messaging.
You need to make sure that you use these avenues of communication for both work purposes and general interaction. You could set up a social media page so that your workers have an avenue to communicate with each other outside of work hours. Then you can have a Skype group that will serve as their way of communicating during work hours. However, you should ensure that you designate which channels should be used for work and which ones to use for social engagement. Otherwise, your workers could have a difficult time following
Utilize Remote Working Tools
We’ve previously mentioned how distractions can cause your workers to be less effective than they should be. These distractions can be difficult to track and crackdown on due to how you and your workers are miles away from each other. However, there are a few ways you can keep an eye on them. These come in the form of remote working tools and they come in a variety of forms.
These remote working tools ensure that you know what your workers are doing while they’re on shift. These tools range from screenshot tools that monitor the desktop and take periodic screenshots, to blacklisting tools that can send you a warning if a worker opens a blacklisted tool. These tools ensure that your workers are working when they should be working and not browsing through social media, watching videos, or doing anything that can distract them from their jobs.
Update Your Policies To Match The New Working Environment
Distractions aren’t the only things that you should be concerned about whenever you transition your team to remote work. One of the biggest reasons that make your remote workforce less effective is because of your own policies. The reason why this happens is that some policies that work in the office are less effective or flat out don’t work in a remote environment. A great example of a policy that works great in the office but is weaker or harder to implement in a remote environment is data protection policies.
For example, you’re a legal search firm with a data protection policy that requires flash drives to be registered and left at the office doesn’t work in a remote setting due to how employees need access to their data to do their jobs, but they then have a way to sneakily steal company data from home. So adjusting these policies to the new environment is essential to avoid any problems in the future.
Have The Right Employees That Can Handle Remote Work
A big factor that contributes to the effectiveness of a remote workforce is the employees themselves. Your employees will all have their own capacity to work in a remote environment. Some will be able to keep pushing out the same results, some will be more effective in this environment and push out better results, while others will simply be unable to keep up. Usually, the last group of employees is your concern because of how they can drag down the rest of the team.
Conclusion | How Businesses Can Keep Their Remote Workforce Effective
You can either train them to be more effective in their new working environment or hire new, more effective employees to take their place. Either way, you need to make sure that all your employees can handle the pressure of the new working environment. In addition to this, the remote working environment may need you to hire new employees that can manage the new aspects of your business.
