With a surging number of companies flocking to remote work structures in 2021, solutions-focused employers are frantically seeking out strategies to keep morale and productivity high. In the interest of following in the footsteps of companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, who have extended work-from-home orders, industry leaders have encouraged hard-working employees to ride out the COVID-19 storm from the comfort of their home offices.
Overall, the attitude towards working outside of a physical office space has been positive, with most employees favoring remote work for its flexibility and convenience.
However, work-from-home setups aren’t without complication. Many employees report communication issues, technology failures, and increased loneliness in the wake of remote work positions. On the other hand, employers and team managers have a difficult time tracking employee productivity, building morale, and communicating clearly without in-person check-ups.
Regardless of your feelings on remote work, it’s likely here to stay. If you’re an employer looking for solutions to streamline business functions and boost employee productivity, read on for five problem-solving tips to conquer work from home dilemmas.
IMAGE: UNSPLASH
Invest In A Virtual Office
If you’re running a business—large or small—you’ll need to invest in proper resources to survive remote work mandates. Regardless of the benefits working from home provides, the inability to oversee business operations in-person at a physical location has proven difficult for many employers. However, with the help of a virtual office, you can receive the perks of a brick-and-mortar office without leaving your loveseat.
By investing in a virtual office space from reputable sites like iPostal1, you gain access to digital mailbox services to help manage voicemails and postal mail from any location. Plus, virtual office packages set your company up with an address, phone number, and a 24/7 helpline so you can troubleshoot any complications that arise.
Utilize Messaging Systems
Whether you want to quickly check-in with employees or schedule multiple meetings per day, you’ll need a way to communicate effectively. A typical plight at-home workers encounter is a lack of communication and decreased collaboration. Working on a single project with multiple coworkers located in different locations is a disaster waiting to happen. Though staff can email back and forth, often inboxes are filled to the brim, leading to missed messages and frustrated coworkers.
However, with communication innovations like Slack, you gain access to real-time interactions with your coworkers along with numerous remote solutions like availability statuses to alert others of your absence, file sharing for easy access, and group chats for office culture perks.
Project Management Tools
Tracking productivity and project progress from a remote location can seem impossible for managers who prefer a hands-on, in-person approach. After all, hitting targets and quotas requires diligent tracking and planning, a task difficult to achieve from varying locations.
However, with project management systems, you can track progress in real-time, keeping tabs on dropped-balls and exceptional efforts. These platforms notify teams to check-in frequently, giving employees a place to update details and current statuses to propel big projects forward and monitor their growth.
Tracking Productivity
Although it’s impossible to track every second of your remote employee’s time, you can monitor productivity and task-management with tools like Toggl, which allows your employees to update statuses and availability in real-time. With productivity tracking systems, you can implement benchmarks each day to keep employees on schedule and delve into individual processes eating up time and employee motivation.
Bottom line
Although transitioning to remote work is filled with learning curves and trial-and-error, there are tried-and-true solutions to get you and your team in the swing of things. By implementing numerous productivity, project management, and communication tools, you can keep track of your employees without hovering over their desks multiple times a day.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
COMMENTS