As 2023 draws nearer, more and more employees are working remotely. Inc.com reported that 63% of US companies have remote teams, but more than half of these companies don’t have a clear policy about remote work. Many companies hire people who work from home because it cuts down on the costs of having a shared office space. Working from anywhere is a great perk, but managing a team of people who aren’t in the same place can be challenging. Since working remotely is still relatively new, many companies trying it will run into problems they don’t know how to solve. In this blog, we’ll talk about companies’ issues with managing employees who work from home and how they deal with them.
Communication
Working with remote teams successfully requires effective communication. Getting all the participants’ ideas and being aware of what each is working on is important. Open communication isn’t always easy to foster when teams are working remotely. Email communication is a formal means of communication that does not allow team members to have fast interactions.
Many remote teams get around this by making a reliable way for quick communication between employees in the same department or freelancers working on different projects. Employees can communicate and exchange short messages using various online tools and services.
Tracking Productivity
Do you know how much work and effectively your remote employee completes projects? The answer to these questions is ambiguous for many managers. Without assessing employees’ productivity when working remotely, it might be difficult to tell if they are being wasted or not contributing their best. Only 3 of an 8-hour day were judged productive, according to a survey of nearly 2,000 office workers in the United Kingdom. It’s simple for employees to get off-task in an office because there are many distractions—conversations with coworkers, random website visits, emails, texts, or browsing Facebook.
To boost productivity, a manager will keep the work assigned to their employees varied and set fair deadlines. A productivity monitoring tool like CloudDesk to block websites unrelated to work and measure or verify hours worked while reducing the number of distractions in the office is an easy way to solve this issue. CloudDesk employs screenshot technology to monitor applications and can highlight improper program usage. Managers can quickly get insights from the clouddesk dashboard and gain valuable data about each employee.
Building Trust
Building trust between employees and managers is difficult for remote teams. Managers worry that remote teams are not working productively, while employees have a range of concerns as they are not communicating all the time with managers. Sometimes they feel that they are left out of important discussions and that managers are not giving meaningful feedback to the employees or not getting any recognition at the end of the year. This issue might force remote employees to quiet quitting. Being transparent can help to build trust for all parties, especially when working remotely. Managers can use productivity monitoring tools to get insights into how employees spend their working time. CloudDesk productivity monitoring software can track productive, break, meeting, or idle time. This gives the managers important data on when the remote team is most productive and how long they spend working hours.
Take Away
It cannot be easy to correctly and productively set up an environment for remote workers. Each component of the remote workforce puzzle must be carefully executed, including productivity management and healthy long-distance teamwork. In the long run, remote work will be more significant than ever in the 2023s. Therefore, overcoming these obstacles is essential to the success of any WFA project, and CloudDesk can be one of the best solutions to help managers make critical data-driven decisions. Try CloudDesk free for 14 days now.
