Managing people may be challenging at times even when the whole team is located in one office. With remote teams located in different places, and sometimes timezones this task may be a bit more difficult. Often telecommuting is associated with less control over the process, miscommunications, and the absence of work-life balance. Speaking about our realia, things get more complicated by the pandemic situation that brings more stress because for some people it’s the first time remote experience, and there are a lot of new things to learn.
So here we go with the top 5 trends every business should follow to achieve effective remote work:
File sharing
Data exchange is an essential process of running any business starting from organizing the company knowledge base files to sharing the videos, photos, and other project-related media. But with traditional file-sharing services like Google Drive it may be not convenient to bring all the spaces together. There is no way to open files for a user group at once, so the process may be more time-consuming, the bigger files may lag if several people are editing them at a time, and you don’t have the centralized control over the logs to track all the changes in one place.
Thus considering tools specifically designed for secure sharing, like the Centrestack online file servers, can simplify this process for businesses. They support integrations with access control systems to grant bulk permissions, manage the system changes and see who was accessing and modifying files making file collaboration smoother.
Productive meetings
There’ve been many recommendations to foster virtual face-to-face communication by using a quick call instead of texting. In fact, such interruptions can have an extremely negative effect, as being distracted several times per day on short calls makes it harder to focus on routine work, increases the time required for completing tasks, and sometimes may bring more mess than help So in order to make collaboration more productive, develop a meeting policy considering the following points:
- Each meeting should have an agenda shared with the participants beforehand
- Making attendance obligatory only for those who deliver a speech or can be affected by meeting results.
- Any meeting should have defined time-frames and end on time.
- If there are no points for discussion, a meeting should be canceled.
It will help to reduce the number of unnecessary meetings and will free more time for your employees to do more important tasks, rather than spending all day in passive listening.
Established processes
Work from home can turn into havoc when something does not work as expected i.e. there’s some force majeure in the remote location, or some system is broken. The first thing to do in order to collaborate more effectively is to create a set of workflows including the rules of remote collaboration, emergency phone numbers, task tracking, and monitoring procedures. It may seem that some things are obvious and do not need to be documented. This approach may lead to miscommunications and poor business results. Make sure that employees know how to find the space with all the documents and read them to make sure everyone is on the same page and knows what to do.
Work tools usage
With the shift to remote and increase in working tools to attend, it may be difficult for employees to cope with all of them at once. If you have several places of incoming information like messengers, CRM systems, and other software, it’s easy to miss critical updates from your boss, or sending emails to the wrong address. Constantly switching between the tabs is not the best idea, so it’s better to choose the whole work suite of products from one company or use tools that can be integrated with one another (i.e. setting automated notifications when a task you’ve been working is approved, there’s a reply from a potential lead, or a new action item is assigned on the project management board).
Following these trends for effective remote collaboration will help to improve the results of your team and achieve business goals faster. It will also have a positive impact on the engagement of your employees. Regardless of the choice to proceed running a business online or to come back to office work, you will certainly want to keep these improvements ongoing.
