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How To Improve Your Remote Team’s Productivity And Boost Overall Efficiency

Managing a remote team will likely present you with a number of unique challenges, so you may be unsure of what you can do to ensure success. If you are looking to improve your remote team’s productivity and boost the overall efficiency of your business, you will be glad to know that there are a few great solutions that you can implement. Most importantly, you will need to develop effective strategies, that will help you achieve your business goals in a remote working environment. Below you will find some of the best ways to maximise employee productivity and increase efficiency when working from home.

Ensure Remote Desktop Access

There are lots of different solutions, which deliver secure access to business applications or full desktops from any location or device, such as Citrix and its alternatives. They can be the perfect solution for businesses, who are looking to web-enable their legacy Windows applications. However, Citrix’s expensive pricing model and complex interface can make it difficult for businesses to use it seamlessly. Therefore, it can be helpful to find the best Citrix alternative, which can provide you with an affordable and reliable solution to meet your remote access needs. TSplus Remote Access allows team members to access apps, files, and data centrally hosted on corporate servers, enabling them to work from home more efficiently with this alternative to Citrix.

Establish Clear Goals And Expectations

It’s essential to ensure that remote teams can maintain focus and align their efforts, which means that you will need to establish clear goals and expectations. Clearly communicate project objectives, deadlines, and deliverables so that everyone understands their responsibilities and desired outcomes. For instance, if you are launching a new marketing campaign, you will need to specify the target audience and determine the key messages that you want to convey. Also, it’s crucial to revisit your goals regularly and provide feedback to employees. This can be done by scheduling weekly check-ins to discuss progress, address challenges, and realign priorities, if necessary.

Define And Respect Boundaries

In a remote work setup, it’s necessary to establish and respect boundaries between work and personal life. Always encourage remote team members to set clear working hours and communicate their availability to the rest of the team. This will allow employees to focus on their tasks without distractions and ensures that everyone knows when it’s appropriate to reach out for support or collaboration. Be sure to remind employees to step away from their workstations and take breaks to recharge properly. You can also advise them to create a routine, which allows them to separate their work responsibilities from their personal time.

Foster A Positive Team Culture

Creating a positive team culture is essential for remote teams to feel connected and engaged. Therefore, it’s advisable to encourage team-building activities and organise social events, which promote interaction, allowing employees to strengthen their relationships with each other.

For example, you can host a variety of virtual events, such as:

  • coffee breaks
  • team trivia
  • book clubs or discussion groups
  • wellness sessions
  • team challenges or contests

Moreover, it’s vital to recognise individual and team achievements publicly to foster a sense of appreciation among your team. Make sure you create channels or forums where employees can share ideas, ask questions, and support each other.

Encourage Autonomy And Trust

Remote work offers employees the opportunity for greater autonomy and flexibility, which means that it’s crucial to show employees that you trust them to manage their work responsibilities independently. Therefore, you will need to provide them with clear guidelines and expectations, but also flexibility in how they choose to get work done. However, it’s still important to regularly check in with them and ensure they feel supported. This can be a great way to cultivate a culture of autonomy, where employees feel empowered to take initiatives and demonstrate creativity.

Provide Regular Feedback

You will also need to make sure that remote employees are given the chance to discuss their individual progress and goals for the future. It can be a good idea to implement a performance evaluation system, which allows you to provide each employee with constructive feedback and guidance. Depending on the team’s needs and dynamics, you can also hold weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly one-on-one catch-up meetings. These sessions will make it easier to acknowledge achievements and discuss areas for improvement, ensuring that remote employees feel motivated and valued.

Offer Adequate Resources And Training

Another key thing to consider is equipping employees with the necessary resources and training so that they can fulfil their potential. For example, you will need to provide them with the right tools, software, and technology required for them to do their work well. Make sure you organise ongoing training sessions to help them enhance their skills, such as online courses and webinars. Encourage them to share anything interesting they might have learned with the team so that you can promote information sharing and team collaboration.

Planning A Virtual Work Event: 3 Tips

Businesses are looking to conduct more and more virtual events. This is partly due to the change in how businesses operate and the fact that so many modern employees will operate across the country. There could be a variety of reasons you’re looking to plan a virtual work event, and it could be for business or pleasure reasons. To help you along the journey, we have put together an article going over three different relevant tips.

Ensure You Are Communicating Effectively

In order for your virtual work event to go off effectively, you should ensure that you are communicating effectively. A lack of effective communication could mean that your team don’t show up on time for the virtual work event or doesn’t even know when it’s happening.

Communication is important in any business, but for remote businesses, it can arguably be even more important. That’s because effective communication can help maintain strong working relationships when operating remotely. This helps your team to know how to communicate with each other.

If you’re unsure why the communication is failing, if it indeed is, then it could be a good idea to conduct an anonymous survey. This could be about virtual communication in general or, more specific, about the work event.

Back-Up Data for The Event

Virtual events are likely to contain much data, such as documents and specific software. For your virtual event to go off without any issues, it will be useful for you to back up the data, as this helps protect your interests and ensures that you can continue the event with no problems, delays, or cancellations.

There are a few different ways to back up your data, but it will be useful to use services such as SaaS Protection. They can help you back up your Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data through a third-party platform, which helps you protect crucial data before your event.

You should also look to back up your data in-house, too. This helps you to have further backups ready for the event. It does, of course, also matter what sort of event you’re looking to host, as professional meetings may need more relevant data than a work-do. Backups can help you prepare either way.

Use Relevant Software

On the topic of backing up documents and software, it will be in your best interest to use relevant software that allows your virtual work event to go off without any issues. Depending on what sort of event you’re looking to host, there will be a range of software options available to you.

For example, you could use video software that allows everyone to see each other’s faces, which could add extra value to the virtual event. There may also be gaming software that you want to utilise, so that you can run a virtual team-building event with ease. This could help bring all

If you are planning a virtual work event with many people, then it may be useful for you to utilise queue management software. This type of software would allow you to slowly let people to the event rather than have them all come in at once, which could be chaos.