High remote team productivity is essential for the success of a company. While remote teams could be geographically apart, they must work together to achieve their common goal - the organization's growth and bottom line.As a remote-first organization, we here at Beefree have embodied remote collaboration and have built systems to ensure productivity and support the well-being of our teams.We've learned that a company whose remote team is highly productive can invest more resources, tools, and support into other vital areas. Here are some best practices for skyrocketing your remote team's productivity.
1. Offer leadership to your remote team
Managing a remote team requires strong leadership skills, as engaging and motivating people without real-life contact is often more challenging. If you see a lack of productivity and morale within the team, work to create a strong connection with your remote employees and focus on developing a positive attitude toward them. When a team lacks leadership, it might sometimes cause a
- lack of creativity
- procrastination
- distractions
It is always a great practice to remind them about the company's vision, values, culture, and what they're working towards. Visualizing the goal and how their individual roles play into the organization's success empowers them to put their best foot forward.At the same time, it is also best practice to acknowledge when they do their best work and celebrate their achievements. An example could be treating them to lunch when they finish completing a big project or task and congratulating them on their anniversaries. Most importantly, they value the time they give to the organization and respect their off time. A work-life balance helps employees rest and promotes productivity and creativity while preventing burnout. And of course, ensure that you are someone that your team can rely on when they need additional support.
2. Implement team management and productivity tools
Team management, productivity tools, and easy-to-use design software help your team stay organized and on track. For instance, providing marketers and design teams with email design systems can help save your team time by using templates and design layouts to create emails and landing pages.Using remote working tools helps vastly boost remote team productivity. A great tool allows teams to:
- Save all their data in one place for easy access. A great example of this is Google Docs.
- Engage in quality communication (chatting inside the document about ideas or using a shared virtual whiteboard for brainstorming) and set achievable goals with it.
- Reduce distractions for optimal performance.
It's important to remember that these productivity levels are impacted by the quality and speed of the tools in place.For instance, design applications require more RAM and scratch disk storage. Production speed can be hindered if their computers have limited RAM, hard disk space, or poor hardware. You must ensure your remote design team has the latest online tools and OS.
3. Practice clear communication
Effective productivity can only be achieved with clear communication protocols. Effective communication helps build a highly satisfied team by boosting morale and increasing employee engagement.Proper communication starts during onboarding and trickles down to training and beyond. A great way to ensure you're constantly communicating with your team is by sending a weekly or monthly newsletter to provide continuous information updates.Along with updates, ensure managers share helpful information with their teams on how to do their work more efficiently. For instance, providing designs with resources, tips, or tools to ease their day-to-day. Do not leave your remote team to seek information for themselves. Instead, try to make it available to them even before they ask.
4. Develop standardized processes
After establishing clear communication protocols, developing a standardized way of working is essential. While everyone has a unique way of working, a predefined work standard is necessary for effective remote team collaboration. This helps provide clear direction specifically on what is expected of each individual.Standardization helps create better clarity and predictability and should be simple to understand and follow. Complicated processes only make it harder for the team to achieve higher productivity.A great place to start is by analyzing the existing processes and noting any gaps. Let this step be guided by your remote team's input and experiences.Then, make it a habit to follow the current best practices and document every process and change. A great way to do this is by running an internal blog that everyone has access to and can provide feedback on.Remember that this may require training your teams on new and updated processes.
5. Invest in business automation
A great way to uphold standardized processes is to invest in business automation. This is also known as the digitization of business processes. At times, tasks assigned to remote teams can become repetitive and take a lot of time that can be spent on more important tasks.Automation helps save time and effort used to perform such tasks. The simple way of automating a business is to use advanced automation tools such as AI and machine learning technologies.Don't forget to set your automation targets and track them strategically to measure their successes.If training is an issue, incorporating an internal knowledge base can be a good solution to keep business processes, procedures, tasks, and training in one place. Various online training tools can help to avoid wasting time on onboarding meetings because all repetitive instructions will be documented in an explainer video or text format.
6. Provide proper training of tools and softwares
While remote teams require many tools to stay productive and manage their day-to-day, training them is not always easy. The implementation of new tools, software, and business automation requires intensive training that, at times, gets forgotten.If you're finding yourself struggling to find time to provide training, consider keeping an internal knowledge base. Various online training tools can help to avoid wasting time on onboarding meetings and constant updates whenever a new tool is added. Online training tools help keep everything in one place and are easily documented using an explainer video or text format.
7. Empower your remote team to take ownership of their duties
Encouraging your team to have ownership over projects and a voice in the decision-making process makes them feel more excited and motivated about the tasks assigned. Giving them ownership means allowing them and trusting them to make decisions independently. This trust helps employees feel like valued members of the team.As always, before giving them ownership, remember to be clear on the expectations and what they will be accountable for. This helps create a sense of responsibility, and they will handle all work keenly.
8. Use productivity metrics to track performance
Productivity metrics provide insights on better supporting and managing your remote team's performance using data points to help you visualize if your team is underperforming or achieving your company goals.To measure their performance, compare the resources you have provided them against the number of projects or tasks completed. There are three metrics you could follow depending on your organization.
- Capital productivity: measures how well the team uses physical capital.
- Material productivity: measures how the team is using resources other than capital.
- Labor productivity: measures the input of every remote team member.
9. Promote team collaboration
Team collaboration helps build better communication and effective teamwork. Collaboration promotes innovative thinking and allows each team member to participate equally in project goals.Much like sharing the company's vision, collaboration helps build a sense of purpose among teams where ideas can be shared to achieve a common goal, increasing productivity and output.To promote team collaboration:
- Create a strong, supportive remote work environment.
- Keep on encouraging members to brainstorm on projects.
- Guide in areas where responsibilities overlap to avoid conflicts.
- Let the remote members know each other and encourage them to communicate constantly and seamlessly.
By working together, teams feel free to express their thoughts, receive positive criticism, and criticize other members positively. Watch this webinar by Beefree to learn how we easily collaborate across departments.
10. Provide feedback
Providing clear, practical, and useful feedback is critical for a remote team's productivity. It is the tool that helps evaluate work done and its progress. Feedback is not to discourage or negatively criticize teams but to provide tactical ways to improve.Feedback provision is a good trait in leadership that encourages growth. Whenever you do it, be sure to inspire team members with ideas to improve their work in the future.
Skyrocket your remote team's productivity with Beefree
The productivity of a remote team is essential for a company's survival, and to achieve maximum productivity, employers need to focus on key strategies. Offering leadership, using remote team management and productivity tools, providing knowledge to solve technical problems, developing standardized processes, and allowing remote teams to own projects can all contribute to productivity.One tool that can help remote teams achieve their goals is Beefree, an email design builder that allows teams to create beautiful, high-performing emails that convert – quickly and easily.Beefree's collaborative nature allows design teams (remote or otherwise) to communicate inside the builder and make edits in real time. Remote teams must work together to achieve their common goal, and effective communication is essential for building a highly satisfied team. The best part? It's free.By utilizing Beefree and other productivity strategies, companies can invest more resources in other key areas and provide better work devices and professional support to their teams.
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