There’s no doubt coronavirus (COVID-19) has drastically changed the business landscape in 2020, with more businesses than ever encouraging or requiring employees to work from home. While some organisations already offered some form of remote work (69 percent of U.S. companies) and had all the necessary infrastructure in place, many workers and managers are still trying to adjust to this paradigm shift.
Some government mandates have forced the issue, creating a huge new population of remote workers. Still, productivity is a primary concern when it comes to remote work. Will employees have the tools they need? Will the tools work reliably? Will my employees? Fortunately, there are ways business leaders can ensure that productivity remains unscathed even as more employees work remotely.
How to Keep Your Team Productive While Working From Home
1. Have Specific Goals
Be it anything; the first step is setting up the goals. Goals allow you as well as your team to have a clear vision and set milestones.
Provide your remote teams with specific goals to achieve in a particular deadline.
Keeping this simple and easy step with your remote teams will allow them to streamline their work process and hence enhance productivity.
2. Equip Your Team with Productivity Tools
Equipping teams with these new technologies allows managers and employees all stay on the same page no matter where they are working from, whether it’s from home or waiting in a long line at the grocery store. These tools might also help keep your team more productive and connected after COVID-19 fears lessen and people go back to work.
- To manage your team and track their work time - Bclok is a time tracking tool that increases your team's productivity, reduces costs, and stays on budget. Employees can manage their work hours and vacations on the same platform, providing a quality work follow-up to your company.
- To communicate with your team - Slack is one of the most popular team communication tools nowadays, and it also has video calling, file sharing, and integrations with other remote working tools like Google Calendar and Jira.
- Collaborative apps - Trello and Asana are visual collaboration tools that create a shared perspective on any project. They enable you to organize and prioritize your tasks and projects and share them with all the members of your team.
3. Take Breaks
The most effective way for remote employees to stay productive, according to the Airtasker survey, was to take breaks (37%). The research found that office workers took shorter breaks than remote workers, though longer breaks have been shown to increase productivity.
Encourage your team to get up every so often during the workday, especially when they're particularly drained or distracted, to grab a healthy snack, walk around their home, call a friend, meditate, etc.
Many people find success using the Pomodoro Technique, which follows this method:
- Choose a task.
- Work on it for 25 minutes.
- Put a check mark on a sheet of paper after the 25 minutes are up.
- Take a five-minute break. (This marks the completion of one "Pomodoro" sprint.)
- After every four Pomodoro sprints, take a longer break.
4. Keep a To-Do List to Combat “Work-from-Home Burnout”
Keeping a to-do list isn’t a new, groundbreaking activity, but it’s particularly useful for your remote teams. A daily to-do list sets expectations. Not only that, but a to-do list helps with:
- Overall organization. When you know what has to be tackled each day (my daily to-do list consists of 3 high-priority, important tasks, for example) it’s easier to manage your day, week, month, and beyond.
- Improved memory. There’s a neuropsychological link between writing and memory. By penning things down, your brain is far more likely to remember what was written down afterward!
- Higher rates of productivity. By documenting daily tasks and sorting your workload into manageable chunks, there’s no feeling of “Oh god, there’s so much to do. Where do I even begin?!” Instead, you can dive straight in and crack on.
No matter how you document and check-off your to-do list—either on a piece of paper or by using checklist software—it’s a simple yet astonishingly effective strategy.
5. Track the Progress
To know your productivity level, you need to track your profits.
If you’re making the desired profits, as per the set goals your productivity level is up to the make. If you aren’t, then there must be some issue with your team.
You need to be active to guarantee your team’s productivity. When you execute a plan, you need to see how it works and also track the results.
In this way, you’ll be able to understand the issue and resolve it as soon as possible.
Use the best tracking tools out there to measure the process as well as the results.
Final Thoughts
Amidst the outbreak of coronavirus, to stay productive while working from home, use these remote working tips and tricks to not only produce an outstanding output, but ensure your team to not overwork, feel burnout, and get too stressed by not managing their time properly.
Also, if there ever was a time to make employee mental health a priority, it’s now. There are no silver bullets here to make everyone perfectly happy, focused, and productive. But as you try to make sense of a world that's changed beyond recognition almost overnight, stay open, honest, flexible, and stay human.
Keep safe and stay healthy!
