In this pandemic period, working remotely or from home has become a new norm. However, companies find it increasingly difficult to manage their remote teams and tracking their activities. There, task management software or a feature-rich team task management tool comes into the picture. It enables companies to keep track of employees’ activities and establish a culture of accountability in the remote workplace.
Let’s go through some of the most effective ways that enable you to manage the tasks of your remote employees and enhance the productivity of your company.
Use Online Task Management Tools
With the right planning and a feature-rich task management tool, companies can easily manage a remote team. Here three elements are crucial- quality, reliability, and communication for managing the remote team. Online tools for communication like Skype and task management like TaskOPad can work wonders in assessing workload and managing tasks. These online tools can also add value to your business and increase transparency.
Get Assistance from Advancing Technology
Task management software can help companies create greater accountability among their employees and show more transparency. The
team task management tool can show the entire team who is working on what projects and which phase of the project is in progress at a specific time. Also, advanced features in this tool show employees key timelines and deliverables. These aspects make employees more responsive and ready to accomplish their tasks.
Establish Communication
It is of utmost importance for the company management to stay in touch with remote employees after assigning tasks to them. Regular communication through various channels can assist managers to avoid missing any deadlines with the real-time intervention in the project.
Frequent check-ins with remote employees can also enable project managers to reduce the chances of human errors, and remote workers get the feeling of inclusion because of continuous interaction and engagement. It is better to set rules of engagement along with the frequency and ideal timing of communication to keep everyone in the loop.
Ask for Reports
Managers can keep track of all the tasks assigned to remote workers simply by asking for weekly reports. These reports not only give an outline of accomplished tasks but also give a glimpse of tasks to be accomplished in the coming week. Weekly reports can effectively assure accountability and ensure that all the employees are in the loop.
Also, weekly reports can assist managers to guide employees remotely when things do not align with the expected or current workflow. High priority tasks and trivial tasks can be also classified with ease and it becomes easy to set the priority.
You can also ask for an end-of-day report. This is specifically important when remote employees work on milestone-based projects or other projects in which deadlines need to be met. Here, task management software can play a vital role and eliminate the need for daily reports. The software can show the progress of every remote employee for each task on a 24/7 basis.
Hold Video Conference
Weekly video conferences can help you keep in touch with remote employees and give you a chance to know their thoughts. Also, such meetings can help managers assign tasks in a manageable way for every employee. During this video conference, KPIs of all remote employees can also be discussed to allocate them tasks accordingly. Holding video conferences regularly can keep remote employees on the right path.
Use Time-tracking Tools
Chances are fairly high that remote employees while working from home, spend more time doing personal chores. It directly affects their efficiency and productivity. As a result, even if your employees appear online all the time, you may not get the work as per expectation at the end of the day.
What’s more, remote employees can easily get distracted and spend more time on social media during working hours. Here, time-tracking tools can lend a helping hand for project managers. Tools like Time Doctor Tool can track the employee’s internet usage and measure their productivity. Such tools also assist managers to monitor the remote employees’ online activities like time spent on social media and clicks.
Concluding Lines
Managing remote teams is quite a task for modern enterprises, however, these tips will remain helpful for managers to keep track of their remote employees and maintain productivity. It is fair to mention that a feature-rich task management tool can effectively show the progress of every employee and your company can save a lot of time and effort in tracking the daily activities of remote employees.
Originally published at https://www.taskopad.com on November 2, 2020.
Top comments (3)
Yes, it's not easy to track the productivity and happiness of employees remotely, but management should make sure that employees are not being burdened with meetings after meetings. In the WFH situation, calls and meeting timings are increased already and as an employee, I really feel some of the meetings are not at all required and we should avoid them so that one can concentrate on work. The productivity of employees will increase if they work happily, so I advise management to first check the issues that employees are facing like meeting and work overload or having issues with laptops or machines if provided by the organization, insufficient hardware configuration or so and try to resolve it.
The management won't have to then explicitly track employee's productivity, they'll get appreciation mails from clients directly.
Thanks for sharing! I am using Quire as my task management tool and it's one of the simplest tools I've used. Collaborating with my teammates has never been easier with Quire. I've never heard of Taskopad but I'll try it soon.
We use Restyaboard to organize and automate our business. A fantastic free tool that has helped us to organize our employee's workflow and improves productivity when working from home.