There are numerous challenges in remote work that might just keep project managers from achieving their goals. Below is a list of 5 main challenges that almost every manager faces when dealing with a remote team and how to successfully tackle them.
Productive Project Management
Is your workforce in various locations? If so, it would be difficult to not only coordinate and handle your project but also achieve the desired outputs. You’re a manager and you’d like to make sure that your employees meet their deadlines. Not meeting their deadlines can frequently lead to low revenue as clients always wish to see their projects being achieved punctually.
When your staff is situated in many different places, reaching out to them and tracking their progress and effectiveness of work is difficult. For that reason, several business owners seek top-notch project management software, to handle their remote team and accomplish positive outputs.
Utilizing the right software will allow planning and managing every project management aspect, balancing your staff’s workload, and ensuring that their work completes punctually.
Better Staff Management
You may be telecommuting, but it should not keep you from communicating through means other than chat. Your staff members must have direct physical meetings face-to-face on video chat. Video calls may be the best means of communicating with your staff. Anyhow, meetings where all the parties are physically present in one place, will allow you to easily give feedback to that workforce.
To have better staff management, you must set practical expectations for what your team does. It is a must to correctly communicate your staff’s work scope and deliverables in advance so that you can easily monitor their progress. Preparing objectives and key results (OKR) spreadsheets, is among the best ways of managing projects. Establishing measurable objectives, and holding every staff member accountable for their assigned task, will aid in making them more productive.
Distractions When Working
The main cause of employees failing to deliver at the time of telecommuting is due to distractions. Your loved ones may be around you throughout this time, so it is occasionally tricky to disconnect from them.
Your entertainment devices can also keep you from paying proper attention to your work. Having no one around to make you remember what you have to do, means you will waste much time that you would spend working otherwise.
Here are a few tips on how to avoid distractions when telecommuting.
- Tell your loved ones to not disturb you when there is much work to do.
- Limit TV viewing, social media use, chatting with loved ones, and listening to music played at a high volume.
- Set up an office at some spot in your residence that will allow you to work with the least distraction.
- Be sure to keep your laptop, notebook, pens, and other important work resources at an easily reachable place to reduce movement.
- Establish a deadline for your staff and yourself. Thus, you can encourage your workers to deliver in a particular timeframe for better productivity.
- With distraction blocking applications, restrict your staff from accessing Instagram, Twitter, and other social networking websites during work timings.
Trust And Accountability
Nearly every project manager encounters the challenge of building trust in all members of a remotely distributed staff. Is your staff working in various locations without being able to see what each other is doing physically? If yes, it would be difficult to trust all of them. You take their word for it, which renders it tricky to build a sense of trust with them.
There are many tools to manage trust problems in a remotely deployed team. For instance, you can see the face of each staff member right through the day with tools such as PukkaTeam and Status Hero. You also have check-ins, objectives, and activities throughout that team to keep them abreast, alert, and ready to handle any issues that may arise.
Below are a few tips on how to improve trust with them as they telecommute.
- Teach your staff about how important it is to be transparent at work.
- Utilize the appropriate collaboration tools which help to encourage your staff to have that transparency when working remotely.
- Set a common objective that encourages your staff to work in unity. If you set an objective, each of your staff members possibly would work like that.
- Micromanaging your staff is likely to make your staff less productive over time, so avoid doing it.
- Be sure to stay reliable and responsive to that team. You must let them know that they can always approach you to discuss their problems and that you will pay attention to these then. Thus, you can not only build trust but also cause people to have faith in you.
Improved Time Management
Does your project have a specific timeframe within which results must be delivered? If yes, time would be crucial. Usually, working remotely saves a lot of time that you may use to commute to work daily otherwise. Anyhow, having much time to work means you could frequently waste plenty of it.
Whenever you are telecommuting, it is very important to track your hours. Make a daily routine or schedule for work and household chores. When making that schedule, think about every activity in your daily life, including preparing dinner, your workstation, as well as cleaning.
It is possible to better manage your time when telecommuting through the following measures.
- Utilizing tools such as Wunderlist, Harvest, and Time Champ. Using these tools allows setting reminders for your work time limits, scheduling events, and creating checklists for your staff.
- Making a list of things to do assigning various tasks you plan on accomplishing in the daytime. The list has to be flexible enough to leave you with some amount of time to relax.
- Getting up from bed early and completing your household chores punctually.
- Setting your hours of work as well as strict time limits for every single task.
