Love it or hate it, but remote working has established itself as a perfectly viable way of running a business. And while some companies may have had a rougher remote start than others, by this point pretty much all of us are used to the fact that we have to work out of our bedroom.
Not only is this way of work viable, but it brings some pretty nice benefits to the table like greatly reduced office rent costs, the ability to hire professionals from all over the work, higher worker satisfaction, and, if you do it right, even increased productivity.
And inspiring your team for increased productivity is exactly what we’re going to focus on today. Some employees can struggle with staying productive when in their home environment, especially if they have pets, children, or somebody else to share their living space with.
However, there are some things that you, as an employer, can do to inspire them and deliver better results.
Implement Remote Working Tools
There is a large variety of remote working software built for managing different aspects of your teamwork. Whether it’s a time tracking, communication, or project management that you’re looking to improve, you will definitely struggle to do it without using the likes of Jira, GitHub, Microsoft Teams, Trello boards, Slack chats, amongst other tools.
And while they don’t strictly work for inspiration, these pieces of software are absolutely invaluable for managing your day-to-day processes and keeping both short and long-term goals insight of every single one of your workers.
Stay in Touch with Your Team
When you’re the one in charge, it can sometimes be easy to forget that your employees are just as human as you are, especially if 100% of your communication with them consists of handing out tasks and going through their progress reports.
Since you don’t get to see each other at the office, it’s extremely important to stay in touch in other ways. Daily online meetings that last five to fifteen minutes discussing yesterday’s accomplishments and setting new goals for today is a great example.
Longer, weekly, and monthly meetings are better suited to analyze your team’s progress in more detail. Setting tangible goals helps employees better understand the steps they need to take to accomplish them. This understanding, in turn, creates a feeling of protection, boosts confidence, and motivates employees to contribute more.
Coworking and Workstations
It feels good to come back to the coworking every once in a while and relish in the feeling that everyone around you is focused on achieving the same goal, together (as opposed to distracting you at home).
It’s even better than the office, with all of its amenities, office furniture, rooms, often awesome designs, events, and, of course, free coffee and cookies.
It feels even better to go to a new city or even country and learn something new about the world. So, why not organize a few workation trips for your best workers? It will feel both as a reward for working hard, and as a motivation to keep doing it while refreshing their minds a little bit without actually having to give out days off.
A full-on company retreat to some awesome destination will also do wonders for team buildings and breaking the ice between new team members.
All you really have to do is to rent a coworking space in your destination for a couple of days, and pay for the plane tickets if it’s far away. Coworkings also offer co-living opportunities quite often.
Visualize Your Reports
It is not a secret that our brains are much better at processing visual data than plain text. So, at your next online meeting, why not use some kind of data visualization or business intelligence tool to turn boring old spreadsheets and confusing graphs into something much more readable at a glance?
Visme, Microsoft Power Bi, and Tableau are just a few examples of such software. Seeing a percentage increase in organic traffic, for example, is one thing, but looking at the same data in a form of a bigger crowd of people than last month is completely another. Speaking of organic traffic increase, SE Ranking is a great tool for measuring all of your search engine optimization improvements and competitor research.
Visualization adds a whole new layer of satisfaction and a much greater feeling of accomplishment to your and your team’s work. Besides, visual data is much easier to digest and comprehend even for team members who aren’t analytics professionals. This, in turn, translates into increased motivation, which is exactly what you’re looking for.
Worried that you or your employees will spend too much time creating those reports instead of doing something more productive? The awesome thing about them is that you don’t actually have to design them yourself.
There are plenty of pre-made report templates that you or your team can download, simply put in your own data, and get ready for the meetings in only a few minutes.
Let Your Employees Manage Their Own Time
As long as your workers meet your daily and weekly goals, does it really matter if they start work at 9 in the morning or at midnight? Some people prefer working in the morning, while others get that sudden spark of productivity and creativity well after supper time.
If you’re hiring employees from all over the world, you can’t physically maintain the same schedule for everyone, even if you would like your team to all work at the same time. This is where time trackers really shine.
Creatives work better when not under time pressure, and letting them manage themselves will lead to a better working atmosphere and improved efficiency.
Employees will view work as part of their routine, and not look at it as something they are forced to do at 9 in the morning because if they don’t do it, their boss will be mad with them, even though they are at home.
So far we were discussing what you can do on your side as a manager or CEO to improve your worker’s productivity and inspire them to perform better from home. Here are also some workflow hacks you can use yourself and share with your team.
Conclusion
Low motivation can be a common issue for remote workers, but if you regularly hold online meetings, visually review all of your progress, let your employees manage their own time, and take the best of them on an awesome workation to a country they have never been to before, you will be able to motivate and inspire them to work smarter, and contribute much more to the team.
Take advantage of awesome time tracking and performance management software, and stay in touch with your team members.
Organizing an efficient remote workflow might sound like a difficult task at first, but with the right approach, your team will be just as efficient (if not more), as back at the office.
