Working from home is as stress, as much as it’s relaxing to spend your whole day in your pajamas. But for one reason or another, sometimes we just have to spend a couple of weeks working from home or even lead a whole company remotely.
And in order to do that you’ll have to do certain things in order to both stay productive and keep your sanity. Because once you spend two weeks working from home, finding a clear separation between working and not working can be quite difficult.
But there are numerous ways to feel like a team when you’re working remotely. if you’re in the same city brainstorming a couple of wellness program ideas and doing them in your free time can be a great team-building experience.
But enough, rambling, let’s go over five ways to keep your remote team productive while working from home.
Make sure you’re having daily meetings.
Daily meetings can be a bit of a double-edged sword, but if you keep them short and just update yourselves on the most important tasks you shouldn’t really have any problems.
Often regarded as “daily standups”, quick daily meetings can help with everyone being updated on what their colleagues are working, and if you’re a manager you can better manage where time is spent.
Overcommunication isn’t a bad thing.
When you’re lacking regular face-to-face contact with the people you’re working with, often it’s important to make sure what you write and request from your colleagues to be done is crystal clear.
That’s when overcommunication can be beneficial in order to limit the chance for you to misinform and potentially cost the company time and money.
So, make sure you keep your emails and chats as clear as possible.
Utilize project management software.
If you don’t by now. In order to make sure everyone is doing their best work on the projects, they’re responsible for, as well as keeping track of everyone’s work.
Asana, Portica, and Toggl are all great examples that allow you to assign tasks to different team members and keep track of everything that’s been done throughout the day.
Not only that but seeing your tasks and your team’s tasks can greatly help with productivity and motivation, as you’re all working towards the same goal. So, if you haven’t done it by now, consider testing one of the three tools above and see how you can implement it to your workflow.
Have a weekly after-work meeting.
But make sure you leave any work-related topics for the next day. Spend some time with your colleagues to discuss hows life going and just have a friendly chit chat. Something like watercooler talk.
Just because you’re a remote team, it doesn’t matter that normal office stuff should be forgotten. Instead, act like you normally would and spend some time conversing about non-work related topics.
Make sure you keep everyone in the loop.
It doesn’t matter if it’s for a project, or a company-wide update, make sure everyone’s constantly updated about what’s going on.
Working from home often limits the amount of information that’s reaching everyone, so make sure everyone you know is constantly updated if there are important emails or any news that need to be shared.
