The longer employees work remotely, the higher the loss in productivity. How can you help your team stay focused on results?
A year has passed since the introduction of the self-isolation regime. Someone marked this event with the successful return of employees to the offices. Some, on the contrary, continued to work in a hybrid format, or even decided to switch to “remote” forever.
However, while distance stimulates some employees, it discourages others. More and more, a pattern is emerging: the longer employees work remotely, the more companies report a drop in productivity. So, according to Vocon, if in April 2020 56% of companies rated the productivity of remote work as “excellent”, then after six months, 40% noted a decrease in labor productivity.
Employees themselves cite the difficulty of remotely resolving issues (as reported by 55% of respondents), the inability to focus on work due to relatives or household chores (24% and 22%, respectively), difficulties with self-organization (18%), and technical problems as key factors in reducing productivity. (sixteen%).
How to deal with negative factors and establish effective work of a remote team?
- Permanent contact
For many people, telecommuting is a big advantage in itself. At the end of last year, we interviewed more than 1.5 thousand people throughout Russia and almost half of them (47.4%) noted that they would like to work remotely, or alternating a similar format of work with the office. In Moscow and the Moscow region, the percentage of such people turned out to be even higher – 51.4% of the number of respondents. Only 22% of survey participants said they saw no benefit in telecommuting.
It is important not so much to motivate remote employees with various benefits, but to competently control their work process. The atmosphere of a virtual office is easier to create when the team has several communication channels at once:
work mail for exchange of information with clients and formal messages;
chat in the messenger for prompt communication;
regular video calls, such as Zoom or Google Meets.The latter are perhaps the most important in terms of a sense of community involvement. Such planning meetings allow you to discuss upcoming tasks, conduct a brainstorm and plunge into the atmosphere of teamwork. At the same time, meetings should not become an end in themselves, they should have a clear agenda and timing. Depending on the size of the company, they can be held once every couple of days, or even once a week. Usually, to discuss pressing issues and plans for the future, half an hour to an hour is enough. Therefore, as with face-to-face meetings, it is important that no one is late and the discussion starts on time.
A good condition for increasing the productivity of meetings is to record their results in writing. It is better if it is not a protocol drawn up by the secretary, which all participants will receive by mail and no one will read, but a short summary in the general chat from the head of each direction in the format “what has been done / plans for the next sprint”. This will allow you to visually assess the volume of work and bottlenecks, and at the same time stimulate the laggards.