5 Best Tips To Keep Your Remote Team Connected And Productive
Approximately three years ago from today, working from home was nothing less of a privilege.
Now, recent studies by Gartner have shown that 88% of companies across the globe have shifted towards a remote atmosphere — it’s officially the new norm, ladies and gentlemen.
Living in a pandemic-stricken world, it’s for our safety that we isolate ourselves as much as possible to successfully avert the COVID crisis. Likewise, it has transformed how organizations used to go about their day-to-day operations.
Are Employees Struggling To Adapt?
As great as it is, remote work also comes with its fair share of disadvantages, as team members begin to feel disconnected and it adversely impacts their motivation to stay productive.
Communication is THE biggest challenge that teams face while adapting to a 100% work-from-home environment. A recent study by Deloitte has found that 53% of companies are struggling to eliminate the obstacles their employees are facing during this major shift.
5 Best Tips For Managers To Keep Their Remote Teams Connected
Regular workers aren’t the only ones experiencing the pitfalls of a remote-based environment — it’s the managers who face the biggest challenge in keeping the team’s pistons firing without any irregular knocks.
Here are a few expert-approved tips that could help you, as a manager, to ensure that your remote team is always connected, engaged, and motivated to give their best in this situation.
1.Host Regular Team Meetings
Do you want the secret to keeping people connected? Regular meetings.
A well-planned communication strategy can instantly boost engagement between the team members, making it a win-win deal for everyone involved.
Keep hosting regular impromptu meetings – make interactive platforms like Google Meet and Zoom your new water cooler. Nothing motivates a team more than sessions where they’re brainstorming ideas and engaging in productive conversations.
2.Give Your Team A Feeling Of Empowerment
Remote workers often come across this feeling of being distant and disconnected from their companies. Everybody wants to be heard and have someone validate their opinions, which becomes difficult in a work-from-home environment.
Employees who don’t feel heard ultimately don’t bother engaging much, due to a severe lack of motivation. So, as a manager, it’s necessary to encourage your team to interact more often, share their ideas and views, and empower them to make their own decisions.
3.Open New Ways For Collaboration
Yes, communication is key, but so is collaboration. Teams that collaborate often to complete tasks and projects stay in sync and motivated at all times. As remote working makes collaboration a little more difficult, it could adversely affect the members.
As a manager, you can introduce new collaboration tools and software to keep your team in tune with everything and create scope for them to collaborate easily.
For example, cloud-based storage, and software like Zoho connect, Asana and Trello make it possible for workers to collaborate and have any information they may require, at their fingertips.
4.Make Working Twice As Flexible
Another brilliant way to motivate remote workers is by providing them with more flexibility. They should be able to choose the working schedule that suits them the most, which makes it easier for them to balance work and personal life.
And you know it — the better the work-life balance gets, the happier the workers would be to perform at their best regularly.
5.Recognize Efforts And Celebrate Often
Workers also tend to be less productive when their achievements aren’t properly appreciated, or even worse, recognized by their managers. You don’t want to be seen as the strict warden in every college hostel who despises the idea of fun and celebration.
Be the fun, enthusiastic, and ideal mentor your team expects you to be – appreciate their accomplishments and make their day. When you notice any improvement, recognize it and praise their efforts. It works wonders.
Summing It Up
Remote work is the new normal – and it’s here to stay for quite some time. And although we humans are known best to adapt and make the best out of every situation, sometimes the going, in such a distant environment, gets tough.
If you notice your team going through the struggle of adjusting to a remote-based culture, use the tips mentioned above to keep them connected and hyped up.
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