How to keep your teams productive while working from home
Working from home works well from some but less so for others but there are number of things you can do to set your team up to be productive at home.
Create presence
Just as in the physical space presence can be felt online. Your team will come together on a chatty forum just like they do in the office. Pick a platform that the whole team will be using and set up one main channel for the team. Then create and encourage chatter on that channel. To get things started you can do a roll-call to give everyone a chance to get past their fear of speaking to the group.
Allow general banter and only moderate the conversation with gentle nudges. If you are lucky there will be a person or two who takes to this form of communication and gets really chatty. This is a good sign as it will rally the other participants and involve them. This will give your team the presence you are after.
Make your team members feel like they are a part of a team even when they are not physically located in the same space. By creating presence you can achieve that.
Create a rhythm
Consistency will create patterns that people will get into sync with. If you for instance kick off a chat on the channel every morning at the time that you normally get into the office at and involve every member of your team you will have established a bit of a routine for your team.
A daily 10 minute ‘stand-up’ is a good example of a productive rhythm. Ask everyone to say what they worked on yesterday, what they are working on today and if they have any impediments to getting the work done. Keep it short and succinct, not allowing for discussions about the work in the stand-up.
Manage the work
The nature of work is not uniform so this will mean different things to different people. There are however some things that can be done to make it easier to quantify the work and make progress more visible. When your team is working from home visibility is harder without measurable metrics.
If the work has a transactional component to it, such as consumer bookings or IT support tickets then create a way to keep an eye on the metrics from the system that you use. For each team member find or put together a report that tells you how many scheduled hours of service were delivered or how many tickets were closed. Then set a target for the team members and keep an eye on the metrics. This will not tell you the whole story but it is a good starting point to get a sense of the volume of work that is getting done.
If the work Is not transactional then try to describe the work that needs to be done and break it into chunks that take half a day to three days of effort (as opposed to elapsed time) to complete. Then create a list of all the work that needs to be done in the next period of 2–4 weeks. Make sure the work that has highest priority is a the top and ask your tem members to give you an estimate for each one. Then keep track of how the team is progressing with the list.
These are some very basic tips on how to manage the work. There are many approaches to this but the key is that you get a sense of how the work in your space is progressing and are able to pick up when a problem arises. When doing remote work you don’t pick up on issues allowing you to take corrective action as easily as when you are in the office so you will need to have a systematic approach to help with that.
Some type of work is better suited to WFH
The benefit of working from home is the lack of interruption. This allows you to get stuck into work that requires you to concentrate. Any type of analysis or transactional work such as processing invoices or writing proposals are very well suited to working remotely. Work that is best done collaboratively is generally best done face to face.
If you are able to then get your team to focus on work that can benefit from the deep concentration you can achieve when working remotely. If not, then spend time testing the tools that can help you collaborate better when not in the same space together.
Conditions at home
As you start talking to your team member over the messaging system you can quickly tell who is responsive and who is not. If you are feeling that a member of the team is having a difficult time being productive the first thing to look at is their personal circumstance at home.
Not everyone has a working environment at home that is conducive to getting work done. A disruptive environment or a poor workstation setup will have a huge impact on productivity. Talk to the staff member and work with them on strategies to get more productive time out of the day. Things that may impact on productivity are:
- Family members sharing the same space where your team member is working
- Noisy working area, including TV or other entertainment close by
- Bad seating or desk
- Poor internet or equipment
Look to help your team member set themselves up in a quiet space, with suitable seating and desk arrangement and make sure their technology is working for them. If they are having problems learning how to use the tools they are working with then seek help from your IT department or find training material online for them to get familiar with the tools. Udemy.com has a lot of courses that I have found useful.
