Widespread remote work is here to stay. While that may have seemed like a daunting prospect in the past, today’s entrepreneurs have many tools and techniques that can boost the job satisfaction and performance of their remote workers. This article takes a look at four such implements and strategies.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
If your organization is full of driven, capable employees, great! You’ve done an awesome job hiring. However, those same traits can lead to overwork in some individuals. Encouraging work-life balance in the following ways is important:
- Make sure your employees are aware of any relevant perks they can use outside of work. For instance, some health plans offer free access to meditation apps and exercise classes.
- The aforementioned conscious limitation of after-hours communication can help employees un-tether from their desks.
- Continually check in on workloads. If an employee can’t finish their work within a normal amount of hours, ask them if they need to offload tasks.
- Encourage employees to adapt to Timeboxing method. Your employees can proactively plan how much time they need on a certain task without wasting unnecessary time.
Proper Communication
Communication is critical with remote workers, just like any type of employee. A lack of channels shouldn’t be a roadblock for you and your organization’s managers to communicate with remote employees and for employees to talk with each other. Between video conferencing, emails, chat messages, and phone calls, there is not a lack of ways to stay in touch.
However, it’s important to both do some research to identify the best communication channels for your organization and to set guidelines on using them. Otherwise, problems may arise: Constant chat messages outside of working hours may leave employees feeling burned out. And fatigue from too many videoconferences is a real phenomenon.
The challenge, therefore, is not so much communicating with your employees as it is doing so in an efficient, non-draining manner. Many meetings, for instance, can instead be emails, and many after-hours emails and chat messages can wait until the next day during normal working hours.
The Right Tools
Working from home can present many distractions but technology presents ways to fight those distractions off. For instance, consider educating your employees on tools like browser extensions that can block certain websites. There are also focus apps available, which work by blocking out distractions for a set period of time. And some collaboration software, like Microsoft Teams, comes with a feature that allows for disabled or reduced notifications during focus time. Educating your employees on steps like these can help them buckle down and focus.
Remote work presents many opportunities, but it can also pose security threats without the right measures in place. Education on common threats and best practices on how to avoid them is necessary. For instance, workers should be aware of phishing scams, that public Wi-Fi networks may be unsafe, use a virtual private network to encrypts internet activities. and how to create secure passwords.
Use a Time Tracking Tool
Another thing to add to an entrepreneur arsenal is a time tracking tool. This is important to review their performance, set a clear goal and increase overall company productivity. The main benefit of special time-tracking tools for remote teams is not to micro-monitor every employee but to make sure they are in charge of their time. At the same time, they can spot unproductive activities and weak points in their performance and do something about them.
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