Because of the pandemic, employees worldwide have had to work from home. Because of this, everything in the office got thrown off, from weekly updates to face-to-face meetings, brainstorming, and fun activities. Businesses need to change these tasks and workflows to fit the new normal and make employees more productive if they want to stay in business.

The main advantages of remote work arrangements are that the worker has a great deal of flexibility in terms of hours and location and can often avoid the need for childcare or other forms of support.

Giving your employees flexibility extends beyond just allowing them to work from home, it means that you trust them with completing their targets on time in their desired work hours outside of the standard 9-5 office routine.

But, you ask, how can businesses stay productive if they have teams that work in different places and have little to no control over employees or business processes? Productivity has been the top concern when it comes to allowing employees to work remotely.

So, this article details a few things business owners and leadership teams can do to ensure employees are productive whether they are in the office or not. So, let’s get started!

6 Ways to Improve Employee Productivity with Work Remotely

1. Let your team have more freedom

Managers often do well in an office setting because they are surrounded by people. They can walk up to an employee’s desk, check on them, and ask them questions. If there’s a problem, the team can quickly get together and talk about it.

The same dynamics don’t work for a team that works from far away. Since employees aren’t in the same room as you, you might want to send your team Slack messages all the time about how their work is going. The last thing you want to do is this. Not only do you waste their time by making them type up updates, but switching between tasks can also make it hard for them to concentrate.

Instead, you need to change the way you manage by trusting your employees more and giving them more freedom. In fact, workplaces that give their employees more freedom to do their jobs have happier workers. Millennials especially want more freedom at work, which is linked to more productivity.

Instead of checking up on your employees all the time, give them clear goals, deadlines, and updates. Start believing that your employees can do their jobs well when they’re not in the same room with them.

With the world firmly moving toward remote work amid this ongoing global pandemic, everyone is adjusting to this new style of working and learning to create a smooth work-life balance.

2. Make your employees more productive by giving them a healthy place to work

Certainly, every company spends a lot of time making the office a friendly place where people look forward to going to work.

To enhance the productivity of your remote workers, help them establish dedicated home workspaces.

Research has shown that well-designed workplaces help employees be more productive and feel better about themselves.

As a general rule, companies should make sure that all home offices feel the same. To get the most work done, you want your employees to be in a place where they can switch to work mode right away. Employers could give employees a set amount of money to help them set up a great home office.

Also, give them more tips, resources, or ways to cut down on distractions and manage their time. If you show them you care, they will stick with you, and as they get more organized, they will naturally get better at getting things done on time.

3. Use tools that keep track of time to improve productivity

Depending on what kind of business you run, you might want to think about time-tracking tools like Time Doctor that help you manage and keep track of your remote team. Employers need to trust your remote workers to do their jobs, and they need to trust you to respect their time and space.

You can get a full picture of how our employees spend their time with these tools. Getting reports about what apps and websites they’re using and how often they take breaks. You can compare employees with the reports. So it’s easy to find outliers and figure out what that might mean for their work.

If you have a sales team, you can use cloud call center tools that let your employees make calls from anywhere and let you track things like the total number of calls and the average amount of time spent on each call.

With these tools, you can figure out why some employees aren’t doing as well as you’d like them to and start making changes. You might find out that someone spends too much time on social media and doesn’t call clients. When everyone on your team knows what good time management looks like, it can raise the bar and push them to do their best every day.

4. Keep in touch regularly and make it a habit

Communication is an important part of any relationship that wants to grow and get better. And since this is a remote job, it is even more important to try to avoid misunderstandings. Use an “instant chat” so that everyone on the team can talk to each other quickly. This will improve communication.

Keep in touch with your teammates on a regular basis and make sure they know what is happening. Also, make sure that you and your teammates answer work-related emails and other messages right away while you are at work.

Make sure you all have each other’s personal phone numbers so you can respond quickly in case of an emergency and avoid making mistakes that could cost a lot of money.

5. Using remote collaboration tools to boost the productivity of your employees

Tools for remote collaboration do help your employees work together even though they aren’t in the same place. Almost every part of your business will gain a lot from collaborative technology, including Engineering, Customer Service, Design, Marketing, and Finance.

No longer does where you affect how productive you are.

Here are some tools you can use to help your employees work together better:

• Microsoft Teams for every meeting
• Agendas for meetings where people work together
• Google Drive is a way to store all of your documents in the cloud.
• The idea is to record anything, anytime, and anywhere.
• Trello helps teams work together on projects.
• Saleshandy, which is a platform for sales engagement
• Sender, an email marketing platform
• Fyle, for a seamless expense management process
• islucid, for translating meetings

6. Get rid of distractions.

Both the office and the home can have distractions. The best thing to do is figure out what these things are and learn how to get rid of them to increase productivity.

This is a great way to stay focused on the task at hand and not be distracted by alerts that are usually not that important.

If you work from home, it’s likely that you have access to a TV. My advice is not to turn it on so that you don’t have to deal with any more distractions and can be more productive and stay on schedule.

During your break, you can always turn on the TV to catch up on the news, your favorite show, etc. The best way to keep your momentum going and get as much done as possible is to avoid using any electronics that aren’t necessary.

Always learn and try new things

Every team is different, and what improves productivity for one company might not work for another. Always try to improve the way you set up your remote. Go to events for remote workers to get fresh ideas. The more you try new things, the more you’ll figure out what works best for your team.

Effective communication is crucial for productivity, especially in a remote work environment. Tracking the amount of time you have invested into your work, allows you to know where you’re devoting and investing most of your time. Time gets away from us, and that’s normal, but having accurate documentation is a great solution to improving productivity while working remotely.

isLucid transcribes your meetings in real time with multilanguage support. You can create tasks or highlight important details through voice commands. Every task integrates with multiple project management and CRM software. isLucid allows you to create meeting minutes and have a generate meeting minute file after the meeting. You can edit it, add tasks and share it with other employees.  

Additionally, with isLucid, people can instantly capture tasks and meeting minutes from transcription, saving 25% of the time for a recap, managing tasks after the meeting, sending follow-up emails, and so on. 

If you are interested in isLucid digital meeting assistant, get it for MS Teams and try it for free: isLucid Download Page.    

You can also book a demo and get a walkthrough: Book a Demo.