How To Keep Your Staff Productive While Working Remotely

A guide to maintaining a well-oiled machine while your organisation operates remotely.

The phenomenon of staff working from home was more or less a gimmick in the lead up to the ever-eventful year of 2020. While a number of new-generation companies were quick to embrace the shift to operating remotely, the vast majority of organisations thought of it as a mere novelty, available to a select few operations that were focussed mostly in the tech sector.

And then, a little-known virus popped its head out from a city in Central China, and set off a chain reaction of unprecedented proportions. In a matter of weeks, workers were separated into essential and non-essential categories, with stay-at-home orders issued by governments to curb the spread of the virus.

While the economic costs of the COVID-19 virus will remain an unwelcome reminder of our vulnerabilities, it’s worth noting just how remarkable the remote work revolution has been in the months past, which is set to continue as we move into the future. Love it or hate it, COVID-19 was the catalyst for a remote work revolution, and it’s not going anywhere- even with the rollout of vaccines.?

Previously, CEOs and management teams were far too afraid of taking the chance with remote workers, for good reason, too. It was an experiment with a seemingly tiny sample size of mostly new-generation technical outfits; the type with ping pong tables and nap capsules for their staff.

The reality for most organisations was that even trialing remote working would likely prove an expensive failure. After all, how could management teams keep their employees on task? How could they keep staff engaged, and productive? Could they even run an effective quarterly meeting via Zoom? How would they keep inspiring staff and maintain a robust company culture with staff suddenly swapping leather work shoes for ugg boots??

To find out, let’s uncover some of the key strategies to maintain your organisation’s momentum while operating remotely!

Need Help Creating Your Own Work From Home Policy? Grab our Work From Home Guide by scanning the QR CODE below.?

“HOW CAN MANAGEMENT TEAMS MAINTAIN COMPANY CULTURE WITH STAFF SUDDENLY SWAPPING LEATHER WORK SHOES FOR UGG BOOTS?”?

The Challenges Of Working Remotely

Before we get into the strategies, let’s first unpack the most prevalent challenges when it comes to operating remotely, particularly if this is new for your organisation. The most common pain-points for management teams and staff members alike centre on five pillars:

1. The absence of face-to-face supervision & communication
2. Difficulties accessing information
3. A lack of support mechanisms for new employees, and less technically-abled staff
4. Distractions
5. A lack of motivation and productivity

In order to better ensure the continuity of your operations while you move to a more remote means of operating in your organisation, the management team must make a commitment first and foremost to invest in support mechanisms for their staff. The overall vision and purpose of your organisation stay the same, but the manner in which you reach your goals will need to be adapted. Thankfully, these don’t need to be radical, or even costly to your bottom line; but they will require some degree of time investment to ensure your staff can continue to produce results for your organisation.?

This is a process that may, however, require the management team to adopt a new style of management. After all, different employees will respond to certain policies better than others. Some of your employees may be able to produce exceptional results with little-to-no supervision, while others may be lost in a world of procrastination without a managerial tap on the shoulder- even if it’s a virtual one.??

Dress Policy

While this point may seem a little pointless, or even contrived, there’s a sizable body of evidence to suggest that dressing up for work, even in the comfort of your own home can increase your productivity throughout the day. Dr Adam Galinsky, a professor at Northwestern University coined the term ‘enclothed cognition’ after he noted improved psychological processes inside the mind of workers that had dressed the part. Dr Galinsky wrote in a research paper that “in some ways, the clothes you wear might have an even bigger impact because we can often see ourselves and what we’re wearing and that draws the symbolic value attached to it even closer to our consciousness.”

This is, of course, essential for members of your team that will come into contact with customers and others outside your business. If your staff look the part while on a video call, those on the other end are much more likely to recognise the professionalism of your organisation.?

Routines & Planning

One of the keys to keeping your staff happy, focused and productive while operating remotely is to ensure the organisation has communicated its expectations when it comes to routines. This includes creating action plans, and the possibility of introducing what’s known as an ‘accountability buddy’ to your staff.

Your organisations should maintain the same operating hours, and staff members should be prepared to clock-on for work at the same time they would in a physical office. It’s important to set the standard, and ensure that all members of staff are aware of the fact that working from home retains the organisation’s routine, so you uphold the level of productivity and the brand’s reputation.

We’ll cover a few ways in which your organisation can optimise its routines and plan with meetings and catch-ups in a later section of this piece.?

“DIFFICULTIES ACCESSING ESSENTIAL INFORMATION IS ONE OF THE MOST COMMON GRIPES OF REMOTE WORKING"?

Work Environment

In the same way that dressing the part for work can increase the productivity of your staff, ensuring your employees have a work environment that allows them to stay focussed and free of distractions is absolutely essential. While it might be convenient to work from the kitchen table, this is actually hindering your ability to stay on-track for prolonged periods of time. It’s essential that you create a workspace that is separate from your personal space. Blurring the lines between work and personal spaces can make it difficult to ‘clock-off’ at the end of the day, and encourages procrastination while you’re on the clock.?

In terms of how organised this space should be, research from the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute has shown that our brains prefer order, structure and cleanliness. The researchers say that a busy, cluttered desk acts as a reminder to our brain of just how disorganised we are, which drains our finite supply of cognitive resources; a messy desk essentially eats up our brain-power. In addition, their research suggests that if an employee is constantly staring at a cluttered work environment, it raises our cortisol levels, which increases our stress.?

Technology

If you expect your employees to hit the ground running when it comes to productivity while working from home, you need to ensure they have the right tools at their disposal. Your organisation has an obligation to invest in the technology that will power your operations while your team is operating remotely. In this sense, productivity is inextricably linked to the technological tools that you give your employees. First and foremost, ensure that your team has access to smartphones, laptops and desktop computers that are relatively modern, and keep them updated with the latest versions of operating software to mitigate the threat of security vulnerabilities.

More specifically, the organisation as a whole needs to look at the technology that it is going to deploy to keep the machine running at speed. This includes software choices to manage your meetings, cloud storage, internal networks that your staff will need to access to get their jobs done, content management systems, email service provider, and importantly, project management software. While a number of service providers will offer either free trials or free versions of their software, it’s important to recognise the importance of an investment in this space. Forking out the extra cash for class-leading task management service is one of the most important investments you can make if your organisation is really underpinning its operations with remote working.

Difficulties accessing essential information is one of the most common gripes of remote working, so if you can cover the technological basics and give your staff the tools they need, you’re on the right track. Finally, ensure that your organisation has set out a communication policy that provides staff with the best and quickest way to get in contact with either their colleagues or supervisors. Different organisations choose different means of communication, but it’s advised that you should not rely solely on email to communicate.?

Give Your Staff Their 'Number'

As we mentioned earlier, another one of the biggest challenges to remotely operating your business is the lack of face-to-face supervision that remote workers face, as well as the distractions that can undermine your success. One of the best ways to tackle this challenge is to give your employees figurative jerseys with a number on the back. This number represents their role, their responsibilities, and what they can and will be held accountable to in future strategy meetings. Whether or not you enforce this with some form of punitive measures is a decision for your management team, but the fundamentals of accountability should act to keep your staff focussed and on-track.

These projects and goals are bite-sized ways in which a staff member contributes to the overall vision and purpose of the organisation. Within departments, managers should assign tasks, or ‘rocks’ that are achievable in the short term, and keep the organisation on-track toward its larger goals. Without these figurative numbers, an absence of accountability often manifests in procrastination and isolation from certain projects. These result in a loss of productivity, and deplete the morale of your staff, which is particularly troubling considering how easily avoided they can be.

Give your team of A-players their very own jersey, and they’ll know which way to kick the ball.?

Meetings & Check-Ins

Meetings and check-ins are an invaluable opportunity for your management team to get everyone on the same page as you tick off all-important action items in your operations. They also represent one of the most important ways for the management team to keep staff productive, motivated, and updated as to what their ‘number’ is. Following these meetings, you want every member of your staff to be confident as to their priorities for the days and weeks ahead. The problem is, however, that a lot of meetings can trail off into tangents and distracting minutia.?

The larger your team, the more difficult it is to have a meeting that is useful for every member. With this in mind, your organisation should deploy small, bite-sized catch-up sessions with staff members to take a more personal approach to ensuring purpose and confidence in their positions. These catch-up sessions are a great way for your staff to raise any possible concerns or considerations of larger projects, before they become an all-consuming problem for the organisation. It’s also the perfect way for managers to get an idea of how projects are tracking, and where they can deploy additional resources to tackle a shortcoming in its operations.?

Perhaps most importantly, these catch-up sessions are a great way to reaffirm an employee’s number, and their list of accountabilities. You can avoid an employee feeling that impending sense of doom when they know they’re slipping behind on a project by having a simple catch-up, allowing them to express their concerns. Often, employees can be too concerned to send a more formal email to a manager expressing their feelings in this sense, however, if you’re having regular catch-ups, these problems won’t necessarily come as a surprise.?

Support Mechanisms

While it’s no doubt a battered cliche at this point, employees of an organisation, regardless of their position should be working alongside each other, supporting one another toward the organisation’s overall goals. We really are all in this together. To make sure your employees know this, in your catch-up sessions, either accountability buddies or managers should also be asking how their staff are dealing with working from home. We all have good days and bad ones. It’s important that employees are comfortable enough to tell their superiors when they’re having a bad day; after all, it’s normal - we’re human.

Management teams and CEOs need to recognise that they can’t expect superb results from staff day after day unless they have an effective support mechanism in place for their staff. Staff morale, and perhaps more significantly, turnover is correlated to how supported your employees feel while they’re working. With remote working, the problem is compounded, because it’s easy to feel isolated as an employee, and believe that you’re falling behind to an irreconcilable point.

A small investment here can pay massive dividends when it comes to the happiness, stability, longevity and productivity of your employees.?

Contributor:?Vanessa Cusumano

Originally published in our Best Practice Infinite Magazine.

Download your free copy:?https://online.bestpractice.biz/view/860721420/