Ensure your employees are productive when they're working from home.
There is lots of responsibility that comes with owning a business.
Your management ranges from social media, marketing, data analytics, customer support and logistics - amongst other activities. One topic in particular that is gaining more attention and occupying the minds of employees and business owners. They want to know whether or not employees should work from home.
Studies have revealed that remote workers are generally more productive than those that are working from an office. Furthermore evidence suggested that remote workers were not only more productive, but were more likely to work their full day shift and take off fewer days from work.
If you are considering a work-from-home structure within your business, here are some insights that may come in handy to ensure they remain as productive as possible.
Invest in time management tools.
Lack of productivity is the biggest hurdle that many remote workers face. Time management programs/applications can help employees allocate and use their time more efficiently. You may have to pay to give your remote employees access to these tools, but it could drastically improve their productivity.
When employees use applications that assist them in tracking their time - and are committed to tracking work progress throughout the day - they are significantly more likely to stay on the task at hand and complete the allocated work for that day.
Time based goals (with rewards).
Another way to help your employees stay focused on the tasks at hand is to assign them time based goals. For example, if you have an employee that does cold calling for your business on a remote work basis, you may want to establish a set of minimum calls per day, as well as sales.
As time progresses, you may notice that some days they exceed their goals and on other days they don't hit their targets, which is usually the case for many employees. What’s important here is that your employees know what is expected of them, as well as their job role and responsibilities. This will help avoid any confusion when you are not having face-to-face meetings with them on a daily basis.
If you wanted to take it a step further to accelerate their productivity even more, you could even offer performance-based incentives. Let’s use the cold calling example again. If, for instance, your employees exceed his daily goal of two sales, you could offer an incentive on the sales over and above the first two. This tactic has been proven to work over and over again. When offering an additional R50 on a sale, it could lead to an additional R2000-R5000 per month.
Hold video conferences.
Video meetings are a great way to help employees be more productive. Isolation is a massive problem among remote workers, and a face-to-face meeting can help with this problem. There are certain behaviours and differences that we lose over basic text chat. A video conference is a great way to connect with your remote workforce.
You can build strong working relationships with people when you're able to talk freely, ask questions and discuss barriers. There are plenty of video conference software options you can use to hold your meetings.
Besides fighting isolation, a weekly video meeting can help your remote team stay on track with their weekly or quarterly goals. If you have a meeting where everyone discusses their goals and whether or not they are on track, you can smooth out any task management issues before it escalates into a problem that costs your company time and money.