Pro Tips to Make Remote Work Actually Work
Helping businesses of all sizes increase their productivity and go remote, here are few tips that any business owner can implement to make remote work actually work.
1. No personal communication:
Face-to-face conversation is tremendously important for remote companies. The intonations, inflections and verbal cues you get from a face-to-face communication simply can’t be beat. Video conferencing should always be the default for meetings in order to keep personal relationships alive among your team.
With that being said, real-time conversations aren’t always necessary and scheduling them can be difficult. If you need to send a quick message to someone, consider doing it with a video recording. This allows you to keep that face-to-face connection and easily explain your message. Plus, the recipient can view it when it’s convenient for them.
2. Meeting Schedule is Significant:
Setting a meeting schedule is one of the first steps you should take when transitioning your team to a remote environment. It’s the simplest way to ensure everyone knows what they’re supposed to be doing and is working on the right projects. A meeting schedule means a weekly or monthly list of routine meetings.
These aren’t meetings you can just cancel all of a sudden. If you don’t rigorously stick to your meeting schedule, you’ll end up with a disappointed, unproductive and unmotivated remote team. Here are a few of the most common meeting types you may want to include in your schedule:
- Monthly all-hands meetings with everyone in your company.
- Daily stand-up meetings among smaller teams or departments to check in.
- Weekly departmental meetings to discuss projects within a department.
- Weekly 1 on 1 meetings between superiors and their direct reports.
3. Don’t rely on Email:
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when going remote is to rely on email alone for communication. If your team is continuously checking their email to make sure they don’t miss a message, they’ll never be able to get things done.
The reality is that email is not instant communication channel and you should never expect people whether in your company or outside of it to respond to it instantly. Instead, implement a chat tool like 3CX or Microsoft Teams for internal communication and use it for that alone. As a simple rule, any internal communication within your company should be done through this chat tool and any external communication with clients, prospects or potential hires should be done through email.
4. No Agenda, No Meeting:
Whether it’s a recurring meeting in your schedule or a one-off, every meeting needs to have proper agenda. And when you’re working remotely, pen and paper or a chalkboard in the conference room won’t do anything. Meeting agendas need to be collaborative in the cloud and connected to every calendar event.
That way, all participants can add discussion topics for the meeting well in advance. This simple action will ensure that all of your meetings go straight and that everything that needs to be discussed will get discussed. Once the meeting starts, simply stick to the agenda and work your way through it. It’s that easier.
5. Productivity Killers:
Whether it’s a phone call, a text message or slack-message-notifications will kill your productivity. And when you’re working remotely, the amount of incoming notifications will easily double or triple compared to what you may experience in a physical office.
One simple tip: If you need to ask someone a question or send them a notification, consider whether it needs to be sent right now or if it could wait until the next time you meet with them. If it can wait, add it to your next meeting agenda. You’ve just reduced one more notification from that person’s day.
Clarity is proud to have been providing one premises and Cloud Hosted Telephony to the America’s and the world since 2006. Our clients are worldwide and currently using our unified communications platform. Clarity Technologies Group, LLC surpasses expectations.
Call Clarity at 800-354-4160 today or email us at [email protected]. We are partnered internationally around the globe and we are open seven days a week 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM EST/EDT. http://45.33.92.219 and https://dotmantech.com.
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