The abrupt change for most employees from in-office workspaces to remote work has been garring, to say the least, and that’s discounting the global pandemic that caused the shift in the first place.
However, most employees are no expected to reach their work goals and stay productive even though the mental (and physical, in the case of children, and pets) interruptions never stop coming. Unfortunately, for a business to succeed, we need productive employees.
The solution to this hard problem is all about the settings and the strategies that help provide a solid working environment, even remotely. Keep on reading for our top seven tips on how to boost productivity, specifically tailored for mobile work.
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Mobile Work 101: Remove Any Ambiguities
You can’t expect your employees to keep up with the work requirements without giving them guidelines on how to succeed. This can only be done by conducting step-by-step remote training, as well as a walk of a daily work schedule.
Start by deciding whether you’ll be delivering your training in a synchronous or asynchronous, and you’ll want to decide whether you want a specific instructor or manager to lead the training, or have it based on activities and teamwork. Moreover, you’ll want to integrate some virtual icebreakers before you get to the meat of your training.
After you have a basic template of what your training sessions will look like, now is the time to ensure that all of the participants have functional log-in credentials. As a matter of fact, you’ll want to confirm that your remote workers aren’t facing IT problems with either their internet connections, their software, or their hardware.
It can be a bit difficult fixing these problems from the getgo, especially since there won’t be an IT specialist down the corridor. In addition to the typical IT problems, you’ll want to keep a rather close eye on your network’s security. After all, your employees should have secure remote file server access to the appropriate business data.
Assign Mentors for New Remote Employees
As a business, you might have already had a portion of your workforce working remotely before COVID-19 hit.
On the other hand, if you’re like the majority of other businesses, where the bulk of their employees has to accustom themselves to a rapid shift from in-office work to mobile work, then you’ll need to give them a touchstone in the form of a mentor to ease the process.
Moreover, there’s no escaping the fact that remote work can be lonely in nature. By leaving the water cooler conversation behind in the physical office, you’ll want to set up check-ins and casual conversations during the working hours in their place.
Those can take the form of a couple of minutes of social conversation in conference calls. Or, you can use instant chat tools like Slack to create separate groups that allow your team members to connect amongst themselves and a separate channel where they can instantly reach you, in cases of emergency.
All of these actions can help mitigate the loneliness from creeping in and wrecking your work productivity.
Check-in Frequently
Unlike the social check-ins we’ve talked about in the previous point, here we’re talking about work-based check-ins.
Those would be conducted on both the team-level and the individual employee, probably daily to assess how they’re doing, as well as their status when it comes to working projects and deliverables.
In a traditional office workplace, these check-ins used to occur organically and in-person. Therefore, you’ll want to replicate those to both foster a sense of community and ensure that no employee is left struggling on a task alone.
Monitor Performance and Engagement
Similar to receiving reports about your team members’ performances, or even the level of visibility that you used to enjoy in a physical office setting, monitoring your employees’ engagement and performance is critical for successful remote work.
After all, there tend to be different personality types, even on the same team. Some members you’ll know will speak up when they’re facing a problem, and others are usually a bit shyer in nature.
Implement Time Management Strategies
Time management has always been a challenge for most businesses, and that’s on a good day. With the shift to mobile work, time management’s importance went from “essential” to “nuclear importance.”
You’ll want to implement some time management strategies, like time blocking and the Pomodoro technique, both to your own work, as well as ask your employees to implement them for their own tasks.
Installing a Productive Mindset
In a physical office space, there are always the hypothetical (and sometimes, literal) eyes of fellow employees, managers, and superiors fixed on the back of your head.
That’s why it’s essential to help your employees install a productive mindset. You can help them identify cues, or even set up working sprints to get some of the bulk of their tasks done.
Creating a Dedicated Workspace
By setting it up as a fun challenge, you can help your team members create a dedicated workspace, office, or desk, where they can work for the bulk of their working hours.
This will help with eliminating as many distractions as possible and remove other temptations like snacking away or having other household people interrupt your workflow.
Furthermore, you can set up other challenges like decluttering sprints, so your employees feel motivated to keep a clutter-free and tidy workspace, which can also help increase their productivity.
Unlocking Remote Work Productivity
Working from home isn’t exactly the environment that most employees are used to.
Yet, that doesn’t mean that any hope for boosting work productivity is gone. We hope that our key seven tips on how to help your team increase their work productivity was helpful. You can start by implementing some of those mobile work strategies and see which ones work best for your business.
Besides, remember to involve your employees in those strategies and their implementations. After all, they’ll be the ones dealing with the bulk of the work, so it’s important to give them space to present their own opinions and tweaks.
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