Top 10 Areas of Focus for a Successful & Efficient Distributed Workforce

The globally interconnected economy has made the distributed workforce, cross-functional teams working together without geographical limitations, commonplace, regardless of whether a company is a small startup, a single-office on-site company, or a large multinational corporation. While Covid and the accompanying large-scale work-from-home shift spotlighted this phenomenon and proved its viability, the distributed workforce has always been an area of business evolution.

Digital technology and the corresponding best practices allow the modern-day corporate workforce to contribute their skills and expertise to a company’s success from anywhere in the world. As companies define their roadmaps for digital transformation, create new departments and services, work with 3rd-party vendors, or hire freelance and remote workers, they must clearly define a set of tools and processes that simultaneously evolve. This article reviews 10 areas of business that should be continuously fine-tuned for further efficiency, scalability, and success, hopefully inspiring leaders to make positive changes within their unique environments.

1. Workflow Tools

Your company, whether an advertising agency, software development shop, law firm, medical practice, etc., likely has workflows where designated people or groups handle certain functions or components, followed by stakeholder and/or client feedback and approval. While this has been, and in many cases, continues to be handled via email, such forms of workflow are archaic and highly inefficient.

Tools for project management, creative workflow, official approval, and other types of collaboration are key to a productive and efficiently functioning workforce. Some important features to look for in such software providers include cloud-based & secure solutions, changelog functionality, the ability to comment on assignments & tickets, defining timelines and milestones, assignees & approvers, 3rd-party integrations, and further customization. Intuitiveness is also of utmost importance, preventing resistance to change, and ensuring positive adoption by a company's users. Simple diagrams of processes, people, challenges, and bottlenecks can help each department define its ultimate workflow tool, leading to refinement and automation.???

2. Document & Asset Management Systems

A company's proprietary documents and a creative agency’s digital art are examples of their treasured assets and deliverables, which should be valued and treated with care. Simply storing such documents on local or network drives is not ideal. Keeping these documents secure, auto-saved, and version controlled, all while allowing online and mobile collaboration, is crucial. Also, consider the document & asset management system’s integration into your workflow solution to ensure attaching documents to a process is seamless and prevents redundant and duplicate copies. Other powerful features include advanced metadata and search and the ability to edit and view these documents online without requiring additional software installations.?Finally, a retention schedule is to be considered, which helps reduce clutter and outdated documents, also saving on cost as a company's storage space builds up.?

3. Business Communication Platforms (Instant Messaging & Video Conferencing)

Instant messaging and video conferencing software is also technical yet involves an element of human psychology, in terms of how people choose to interact with one another using these tools. Important requirements for evaluating such software include integration into your existing network of users, ability to collaborate with guests, chat/phone/group conference call functionality, interactive whiteboards and screen/file sharing, and as always, integration with your other systems.

While these features may be important when deciding which solution to purchase, other human aspects tied to business communications platforms are critical to consider, which will gradually make their way into human resources handbooks. The use of animated gifs, emojis, virtual backgrounds, and a decision to turn on video or use an avatar are all personal considerations for the workforce and, in some cases, could be included in company policy. These additional features provide people with identity, self-representation, privacy, and enhanced connections in a distributed environment. With the advent of Web3 and virtual/augmented reality, meeting in virtual environments using 3D avatars may soon become standard practice. Regardless of the tools used for instant communication, it’s always a best practice for someone to later summarize the takeaways into the official workflow tool for later reference.?????

4. Dashboards & Reports

It is impossible to analyze modern-day corporate productivity solely according to the old-school factory mentality of clocking in and out of work. Each person serves as a valuable resource to a company, providing a return on investment or cost of doing business. The value of each person’s skills, their department’s functional effectiveness, and the outcome of the company’s success should be measured using KPIs and collected data. Such data could, and typically does, come from various systems, both customized in-house and 3rd-party software.

It is crucial each system can export its data in a standard format so that another unifying tool can bring it all together to help leaders make informed decisions. Data should be automated and consolidated, often into a data warehouse. Identifying high-level data taxonomies straightaway is essential to making future connections between business areas apparent. Once a company’s data is organized, it can develop a myriad of useful reports and dashboards to monitor its performance in or close to real-time. Resource utilization, financial analysis, workload or sales trends, and areas of opportunity/loss are some indicators that assist decision-makers in driving their company forward. A distributed workforce establishes clear and measurable deliverables, incentivizing workers to work smarter rather than purely based on long and often wasteful hours.?????

5. User-friendly Training

Training your users, managers, and clients on your company’s processes and tools is critical. Many people tend to shy away from new software, systems, or processes unless they feel comfortable. Technophobia can be a real issue, even for people who use a computer and other software daily. That’s why it’s important to provide usage training with an explanation of how the software and/or process helps make things more efficient, along with best practices.

Companies should plan an onboarding process for each role accordingly. Some training requires live instruction, whether through video conferencing or in-person. In other cases, videos can be extremely useful and accessible for people to access anytime they need the information again. A best practice is to create smaller, bite-size video training clips organized into a table of contents or search for a user-friendly lookup. Another great approach is setting up a wiki with videos, images, and text that instruct and explain various company activities. Wikis can host content from many sources, are linked using keywords, and are searchable. Some workflow or business communication tools now include wikis, merging training and your evolving knowledge base.

6. Meetings & Collaboration

One of the most significant pain points across many organizations is excessive meetings, especially when they could have simply been an email. This may be true in some cases, so it is important to plan an agenda along with a goal and document the next steps. Without these important outcomes, what was the point? Important milestone meetings or fun brainstorming sessions can be in person, while quick day-to-day discussions can continue via calls or video conferencing. Even with people in one office, gathering in a conference room for every meeting and then running elsewhere to the next meeting can be time-consuming and draining.

Setting up recurring meetings for ongoing initiatives or groups can also be useful to prevent conflicting schedules. When setting up such meetings, it’s important to determine the frequency, whether daily, bi-weekly, monthly, or less. As these recurring meetings evolve, it may be necessary to re-evaluate the frequency and adjust accordingly. Daily calls are important for fast-moving projects with tight deadlines, while monthly calls serve as an update for a group of stakeholders. Great ideas and fun facts can come from anyone, so as a host, try to include all participants (when feasible) by allowing each person to provide an introduction and feedback on the discussion.?

7. Empowered Leadership Team

When hiring a manager, filling the job requirements typically come first, but other aspects of a person’s ability to manage can greatly contribute to an organization. During the interview process, recruiters and decision makers should identify characteristics of entrepreneurs and innovators, as well as people who are proactive and passionate about their work. Another amazing attribute to look for is camaraderie. A leader who portrays trust and friendliness tends to spread this behavior among their team.

Once hired, such people could be empowered to take ownership, create, grow, and evolve their ideas alongside the company’s mission, rather than just be instructed to do tasks 1, 2, 3, etc. These new team members’ achievements, also praised by the company, boost employee retention and keep people happy at their jobs and with their own management. Leadership teams that contribute their own unique ideas or provide special skills toward internal initiatives are left feeling proud and accomplished.

8. Culture

We’ve all experienced “company culture,” and perhaps some of it is explained during a new hire’s onboarding process; but is the culture truly emphasized from the top down? Despite a company’s goals and values, its culture should always encompass some form of internal goodwill. Teams thrive in an environment where they learn to control their negative emotions while uplifting one another.

Everyone runs into obstacles or difficult circumstances at work. How we react to such issues can either help or hinder the situation. Leaders at companies that consistently focus on and demonstrate this kind of culture lead to employees who are happy, fulfilled, and less stressed. Aside from just being polite, in a new global environment, we must be conscious of various cultures, styles, and even time zones. Inclusivity and diversity lead to new and creative ideas, help gain feedback from additional demographics, and attain new and loyal clients. Providing opportunities for people to go beyond their immediate job description is also a great tactic; it helps people break out of their shells, exposing new skills and greater success for all.

9. Health & Ergonomics

Our health, above all else, is of utmost importance to maintain. When our health declines, it reverberates into all other areas of our lives, including the workplace. As a company, it is key to inspire the workforce to be healthy and accommodate them with various perks.

Providing a bundle of wellness benefits such as discount gym memberships and healthy snacks is great, but there is a lot more that can be done for both on-site and remote workers. If you’re looking to get staff into the office, consider offering incentives such as access to on-site or nearby gyms, healthy local restaurants, and company-provided motivational and coaching programs. These can be amazing benefits that help people build healthy habits while having routines based around the office’s location. New styles of meetings may include a walk around the office’s neighborhood or to a local park, allowing people to brainstorm and communicate, outside of their usual office settings. Companies can provide health tracking, nutritional, and exercise gadgets to employees on and off-site, along with incentives to use them.

Most importantly, it’s time to emphasize comfort. Ergonomic chairs and proper desk layouts, or even alternatives to sitting, deserve some additional attention. Improving this area eventually decreases people’s back pain, tension, headaches, and many other ailments while increasing quality of life and motivation. This can also apply to remote workers, many of whom sit in their kitchen with an improper chair and bad posture. A company can consider providing ergonomic chairs as gifts based on milestones achieved by their employees.

10. Flexibility

As the times change, so too does the corporate environment. The workplace has evolved and continues to do so, and as leaders, we must be able to adapt. The standard workday and week are morphing as companies experiment with shorter workweeks and flexible daily schedules. Remote and hybrid workers have shed much of their previously wasted commuting hours, replaced them with quality of life, and even dedicated some time to stress-free overtime from home.

Employees may need to care for an elderly parent or child during certain daytime hours or squeeze in a difficult-to-get doctor’s appointment, while others may use an extended lunch break to exercise or run an errand. What matters most is that they can still complete their work with quality and within a determined timeframe. As employees realize they can accomplish their work and prove themselves with positive metrics instead of long hours, all while improving their well-being, they simultaneously boost their dedication to their work and performance. Workplace achievements have evolved to be highly measurable, leading to a successful and happy remote workforce that can plug in and out, adjusted to their lifestyle and role expectations.

Digital Transformation & Evolution

Practically every work-related issue stems from poor communication or a lack of engagement from the people involved. All of the topics mentioned in this article are meant to mitigate such causes while also improving the quality of work/life integration. We need to accept that remote work and distributed workforces will not disappear, and companies that are better equipped will lead the way forward. As technology continues to improve, this concept will also expand to non-corporate roles. One amazing example is remote surgery, which goes back as far as 2001 and continues to be developed further.?

There are obviously more than 10 areas of importance when managing a distributed workforce, but the areas mentioned in this article tend to have room for improvement and are directly tied to the success of any company. Each year, as leaders determine their corporate roadmaps, they can use internal surveys to get better ideas from the ground up on ways to improve and evolve alongside the digital landscape. A successful digital transformation will bring many of these aspects together, leading to a company running like a well-oiled machine.

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by Alex Teplish

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