How to Build and Manage a Successful Remote Team
Learn How to Improve Business Efficiency With The Best Project Management Solutions
Want to build and manage a successful remote team? If so, you are certainly on the right track. As information and technology become more accessible to people from all corners of the earth, face-to-face working is becoming less popular. Modern businesses are embracing the trend of offering remote work to their employees and according to research carried out by Global Workplace Analytics; over 1.5 million people are working remotely in the UK alone.
Offering remote opportunities attracts productive employees as they have more flexibility and freedom in their work and also provides a lot of opportunities to exceptional talents from all over the world. Though it is a fast rising business trend, managing a remote team can be challenging especially for managers. One of the biggest challenges is to get the team functioning well rather than having a number of individuals doing singular tasks. The following tips will provide a detailed guide on how to build and manage a successful remote team.
Promote Transparency
In a remote team, the majority of team members are given a lot of freedom to work, and managers have difficulties in tracking their work to determine if they can deliver actual results within the stipulated time. This often happens because when there is a lack of clearly defined expectations.
For a remote team to thrive, a manager has to discuss the project with the team members and inform them of their combined roles and responsibilities towards completing the project. It is vital for a manager to be as transparent as possible and this involves getting the team involved in all aspects of the business, discussing specific goals so as to keep everyone accountable and documenting work schedule, holidays and other ground rules of the team.
Effective and Efficient Communication
In any organization, communication is an important resource tool but when it comes to managing a remote team, it becomes more crucial. A major constraint in managing a remote team is lack of regular, effective and efficient communication within the team.
With the rise of modern telecommunications, managers can choose an effective communication method which may include the use of emails, video conferences, chat programs, and project management tools. Also, communication has to be consistent within the team, and the exact frequency may depend on the person and the type of job.
Since bumping into each other or having shared lunches are not possible in most remote jobs, it is essential to create communication channels where team members may talk formally or informally; this, in turn, boosts team bonding and improves shared attitude towards work.
Manage Productivity With a Project Management Software
In a remote environment, each individual develops their own processes and procedures for working, and though it is encouraged, it is crucial for managers to define and initiate a standardized and refined system of working for each employee to maintain a consistent level of productivity.
Unlike office environments, it can be difficult for managers to understand exactly what an employee is working on or how long they worked; however, with the use of time tracking software, a manager can know the amount of time an employee used in working. To boost continuous productivity, a manager can carry out a quarterly performance review of every remote employee to determine who works well in this system and to develop performance improvement plans for those who do not.
Managers can also make use of a project management application like Podio, in which team members can readily upload all project related materials, files, pictures and status updates in one transparent folder that is accessible by all. Podio keeps the remote team inclusive in the loop and well coordinated, bypassing time-consuming project meetings and improving efficiency.
Set Reachable and Clear Goals
For effective management of a remote team, a manager has to be concise when defining expectations of team members to keep them focused on working towards the same goals. Setting attainable goals for remote employees allows a manager to get a sense of progress and can also make observations on the work of an employee.
When there are comprehensive daily, monthly or yearly goals, it helps each employee to accomplish their task more productively as they understand what they are aiming for. Clear expectations should be set for work practices such as work hours, timely meetings, project deadlines, and communication. Also, as a manager of a remote team, it is important to stay focused on the set goals rather than how it is being accomplished. With an efficient project management software, clear goals can be set for better productivity.
Use Time-Tracking Software
Remote team members usually work according to their own schedule and this may prove cumbersome to a manager that wants to ensure each team member is actually putting in the hours. Using a time tracking tool is a simple yet efficient way of managing your team’s working hours, reviewing their performances and setting clear objectives. This particular type of technology also helps the team members to manage their time better thereby increasing productivity and making them accountable for the use of their time.
Time tracking software also helps to improve attentiveness and productivity as the team members identify the actual tasks that need more time and resources. This software also gives managers an insight into how much work their team is taking on and this helps in timely allocation of work to remote team members.
Use Remote Project Management Software
Managing a remote team involves monitoring work practices such as progress, cost, communication, and deadlines. Having software to manage various work practices allows for seamless working culture in a remote environment as all necessary information is stored under one roof.
Using project management software for remote team members helps to lower costs due to the bridging of gaps through technology, increase work efficiency and improve work-life balance for team members. Given that remote team members may work in different time zones, the software allows a manager to coordinate the flow of information which ensures that data is evenly distributed. This paves way for a transparent work culture which encourages the team to give periodical updates regardless of their physical location.
Conclusion
It can be challenging for managers when they are working with a remote team as they have to monitor work practices such as performance review, communication, and time tracking. However, adhering to the right tips such as using software built for specific management practices helps to build and manage a successful remote team effectively.
Manage Your Workforce Efficiently With Podio
Future Solutions is an Authorised Podio Partner and we can help your organization manage big data and complex processes effectively and efficiently. We can help design efficient project management solutions and build your Podio platform from scratch, optimize your existing setup, automate your business processes, and integrate your systems through custom API work amongst many other things. Sound interesting? Get in touch…
The Gift Of Time
Here at Future Solutions, we have built thousands of automations and integrations. The best thing about automations and integrations is when they’re there, they’re there. You don’t need to think about them any more. To quote the late great Steve Jobs, “It just works“.
One of our favourite automation platforms is Globiflow. Globiflow turbocharges Podio and in our opinion, Podio would be a shadow of the infrastructure that it is without it.
But words can only say so much… What you need is proof, right? Well let’s look at some evidence…
One of our clients is a speakers agency and is a one-person band. They use Podio with Globiflow for everything from contract offer, negotiation and acceptance to billing.
That’s 1 person doing the work of a full time team of 4.
Another client is a training company with 7 full time employees. They use Podio with Globiflow for all their project management, reporting and HR,
They save 145 hours of work every single day, 365 days a year.
One of our clients runs an specialist education website with 6 full time employees. They use Podio with Globiflow. A lot.
If one person worked from 1st January to 31st December for 24 hours a day, our client would complete the same amount of work automatically on the 27th of January.
Interested? Get in touch to see how Future Solutions could help you optimise and leverage your resources, and help your organisation get more output for much less work.
7 Remote Work Myths Debunked
Debunking Remote Working Myths One at a Time
Workers in a hurried commute with frequent nervous glances to their watches are a standard feature of a typical workday. Several strong cups of coffee, needless chit chat in colleagues’ cubicles, hours spent playing office politics and then it is closing time. The workers head home and the cycle repeats itself all year long. With more employees getting burned out and having unexplained absences from work, more organizations are having to consider the flexible option of remote work – a workforce working outstation that is often from home.
However, seeing as the home front is typically associated with relaxation, some managers’ balk at the idea; their minds conjuring up images of a worker in their pyjamas laid up in front of the TV all day, active on social media and yet still getting paid. Is that really the case though? Read on to see seven remote work myths debunked.
Myth 1: More Play, Less Work
It is a popular misconception that the remote worker lives in their pyjamas all day and are usually less productive than the office worker; more so, there is no manager available to keep an eye on them. However, statistics have busted this myth as surveys have shown that remote workers are 13.5% more effective than their deskbound counterparts. As it turns out, remote working is devoid of the distractions common in an office environment such as idle chit chat, coffee breaks, and frequent meetings. A remote working situation gives the employee greater control over ensuring that their work environment is free from interruptions. The result is a more productive and efficient worker.
Myth 2: Inefficient Project Management
That the remote worker is not often physically present at project management meetings and brainstorming sessions concerns some managers who assume the worker cannot fully be abreast and in the loop of developments. This need not be the case. With a project management application like Podio, team members can readily upload all project related materials, files, pictures and status updates in one transparent folder accessible by all. Podio keeps the remote team inclusive in the loop and well coordinated, bypassing time-consuming project meetings and improving efficiency. Podio can be totally customized to suit the needs of a specific project with the project overview and report visualizing in any display of your choice.
Myth 3: Remote Workers Work Round the Clock
Just as desk workers have lunch breaks and closing times, so does the remote worker. Not being physically in the office does not automatically translate to being on the clock 24/7. The remote worker who plans to work effectively structures their work day so as to ensure a healthy work-life balance. Syncing calendars to match that of other colleagues who might be in different time zones and planning their activities around set deadlines are all ways remote workers manage their time. Many remote workers even set up home ‘offices’ complete with a desk and computer that puts them in a mindset for work and where they can work without interruptions from family members who may assume their being at home means they are on vacation.
Myth 4: Remote Work is for the Lazy
As the remote worker’s work station is primarily and oftentimes at home, it has been erroneously presumed to be a shortcut out of ‘real’ work. The truth is that only very self-disciplined individuals can efficiently work remotely. If you are the sort of person who cannot get out of bed without someone coming to drag you or the sort for whom endless chatting on social media and lengthy calls with friends is a temptation, then remote work is not for you. As video conference calls are common in remote working, lounging around in your PJs is not an option; at least not if you want to be taken seriously. Getting dressed and appearing professionally is a requirement.
Myth 5: Remote Workers are Home Bound
Remote working is as the name suggests, remote. Remote can be anywhere not necessarily at home. Many remote workers have found the local café, a home office, a public park, co-working spaces or even outside the country a suitable place to get work done. Being cooped up in the office with its plain walls can be quite draining. With remote working, you can take a breather and work in an environment of your choice that would encourage a better workflow. And with so much technology more readily available than ever before, all a remote worker needs to remain connected and able to work is an internet connection. What’s more, with a cloud-based, cross-platform like Podio remote workers are offered the perfect tool for working and collaboration.
Myth 6: Holding Meetings are Harder with Remote Workers
It is a common misconception that one needs to be physically present to participate in meetings fully. Often because of the ready availability of employees in the office, meetings tend to be called for at every opportunity causing distractions and a break in the workflow. Even worse, such meetings drag on endlessly. With remote workers who have had to sync their schedules and make trips from various locations to make the meeting, such discussions are actually much more productive as the meeting is brief with matters on the agenda getting treated in a timely manner. This leads to greater efficiency for the workforce as a whole, as fewer meetings are held and in less time.
Myth 7: Remote Workers are a Lonely Lot
Seeing as remote working is very flexible, not limiting the employee to work within a certain time or place, a remote worker can only be lonely if they choose to be. Operating from a shared coworking space, working over lunch with friends or even dropping by the office for some face time with colleagues are all ways to maintain contact with other human beings. Being remote, most telecommuters have to do a lot of communication to keep the team updated. With frequent emails, phone, and video calls, there really isn’t much room for loneliness.
Go Remote And Manage Your Workforce Efficiently With the Podio Project Management Software
Future Solutions is an Authorised Podio Partner. By developing a project management solution, your organisation can manage big data and complex processes effectively and efficiently. We can help design and build your Podio platform from scratch, optimize your existing setup, and integrate your systems through custom API work amongst many other things.
To find out more about our services or if you have a question for us, or are you itching to get started, please get in touch and we will be happy to talk through your ideas further.
Top 7 Practices for Better Business Efficiency
Project Management Solutions for Better Business Efficiency
Are you a small business owner or a manager of a team of employees? Whichever category you fall into, you must at some point been faced with the challenge of managing employees to promote a more efficient and productive working environment. Seeing as running a business is a capital intensive venture with recurrent and unavoidable expenditure such as rent, power bills, repairs and maintenance, procurement and staff costs, if you do not have practices in place to enhance efficiency and productivity, you just might end up running at a loss.
Some employers and managers resort to sharp practices to promote efficiency only to have run-ins with labour unions and an unhappy, inefficient workforce. To avoid all this, read on for seven practices to ensure your business runs efficiently.
1. Training
People can only be efficient when they know what they are doing and what is expected of them in the first place. Training is the way to provide learning opportunities for staff to gain new knowledge, hone their skills and discover new methods of doing things. Some companies shy away from training due to cost concerns, preferring to use the trial and error learning method with staff. Online training, webinars, and conferences are cost-effective options worth considering.
2. Connect With the Team
Running your team as an overseer managing workers on a plantation is not a management style that fosters team spirit. You are more likely to create an ‘us against them’ dynamic. Connecting with your staff, getting them to understand and share the organisation’s vision would make them more enthusiastic about their jobs. When your staff are emotionally engaged with your organisation, they put forth their best and even bring forward fresh ideas to take the organisation in the desired direction. Do not rely too much on emails and motivational quotes, get the engagement done in person. Plan team building sporting events or social gatherings to engage your staff in a relaxed atmosphere.
3. Reward the Team
As your staff don’t own the company, their zeal and commitment might not be as much as yours and may require some form of a reward system built around recognition for their support and hard work. Some managers concerned with keeping their overhead down offer ‘promotions’ without pay: a new title with increased responsibility but no additional pay or perks. More times than not, the results of this are counterproductive as you end up with staff disgruntled and disillusioned with the company. Inefficiency becomes the order of the day as your employees no longer care. Incentives need not always be monetary. A special meal with the Chief Executive Officer, additional leave days, free social/sports club memberships or public recognition are ways to encourage and reward hard-working employees.
4. Work Smart
A number of companies have time-consuming processes and routines that are not particularly relevant to the job and take up time that could have been widely used to complete tasks. Forty-minute meeting sessions every morning are a part of some companies’ routine. Other organisations are more focused on time spent at work than on actual work that got done. Are you that manager who gets all riled up seeing staff leaving at 5pm despite that being the official closing hour? Do you measure commitment by the length of time spent beyond stipulated closing times on a regular? Keep your eyes on the prize, focusing on productivity and results rather than time spent.
5. Consider Remote Work
Do you have an employee who is very smart, hardworking and committed to always getting the job done? Is this staff also a single parent with frequent time off work to address domestic matters? Or is the staff an only child with aged parents requiring frequent visits? You could lay off the employee and take your chances retraining a new hand or you could tap into the world of remote work. Consider offering the opportunity for such persons to work from home checking into the office for face to face meetings at agreed times. Oftentimes a lot of jobs do not require actually sitting in an office to get it done. With the use of a project management application such as Podio you can manage big data effectively with your team remotely. This means more efficiency and a happier working environment.
6. Keep your focus
Multitasking is a ‘thing’ in the business world with many employees taking pride in their supposed ability to do a thousand and one things all at the same time. The reality of it though is that a bunch of projects get picked at with the important stuff hardly getting done. Focus on priorities and do not bog down your employees with work that really can wait. Be clear on your expectations and the timeframe in which the task needs to be accomplished. Attempting to multitask is similar to a juggler trying to juggle ten balls all at once. Chances are high he can hang onto all balls if they are thrown in one at a time. Ten balls all at once will likely end with all of them on the ground and the juggler disoriented.
7. Communicate Clearly
Cases of messages getting lost in translation happens a lot more frequently than one would think. Send email messages directly to the person concerned rather than through a third party. Encourage open communication by not fostering a culture of fear where employees fear reprisals through appraisals. Employees in a healthy work environment feel free to share concerns, feedback on public perception of the organisation and ways things can be better done when open communication is encouraged. When the feedback is negative, endeavor not to react emotionally, lashing out at employees or threatening them with summary dismissal. Staff and humans, in general, tend to work more efficiently in a system where they feel heard rather than in an atmosphere of fear.
Manage Your Business Efficiently With the Podio Project Management Software
Future Solutions is an Authorised Podio Partner. By developing a project management solution, your organisation can manage big data and complex processes effectively and efficiently. We can help design and build your Podio platform from scratch, optimize your existing setup, and integrate your systems through custom API work amongst many other things.
To find out more about our services or if you have a question for us, or are you itching to get started, please get in touch and we will be happy to talk through your ideas further.
Q1 2018
2018 has started strongly, with many exciting developments for our clients.
We have been working on a Podio CRM system to match young people with childcare and training services. As part of this, we built a custom integration with Xero (cloud account system) and WooCommerce on a WordPress platform. Whilst these integrations took longer than expected to complete, we now have a firm base to build upon and will allow the client to build their own integrations on top.
Another major project was a one-of-a-kind mass purchasing and licence allocation function for an e-commerce platform, and linking that to a Podio database and integrated company invoicing function. We are not aware of any product on the market that can achieve what we built, and are very pleased with the early results: full public release follows in April.
The company continues to grow month after month, and is about to start work on several new builds in Q2.
If you would like to discuss how we could help your organisation to grow and develop, please do get in touch.
Project Updates
We are fortunate enough at Future Solutions to work alongside some fantastic organisations and help them achieve more in a fraction of the time and effort.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the projects we are working on at the moment:
- A stock management and communications platform for a furniture upcycling organisation
- A communications and project management platform for a youth organisation
- A CRM, e-commerce and customer portal for a childcare organisation
- A membership platform upgrade for a higher education organisation
- A client onboarding and contracting process for a social enterprise organisation
Sounds interesting? It is! Feel free to get in touch with us to see how Future Solutions could help your organisation achieve more. We offer a variety of services including business process consulting, implemention, support, development and web hosting.
2018 has been a great year so far: let’s make it even better…!
Get ready for launch!
Today we are excited to announce the official launch of The Future Group!
The Future Group is a collection of organisations seeking to achieve positive change. Our vision is a society where all organisations are led by socially conscious people. Our mission is to create a more sustainable and brighter future, by inspiring individuals and supporting organisations to achieve their full potential.
We have four founding members: Future Foundations, Future Foundations Society CIC, Future Solutions, and our pioneering leadership movement Global Social Leaders. Bringing them together under one banner helps to communicate that they are all part of a bigger idea, that they all work together to achieve positive change, and they are all united.
We also have four key partners: Devas Club, Lovvol, Oxbridge Guardians, and our latest partner Role Models. All our partners work alongside us in our office hub in the Devas Club building (in Battersea, London), and share our vision and mission.
Find out more at our website: www.ourfuturegroup.com
We will be holding our launch day on Saturday 2nd December at the Devas Club in a jam-packed day of workshops, sessions, experiences, sport, and socials running throughout the building. Save the date! We are looking for members of our network to volunteer to lead a session that they are passionate about that is aligned with our vision and mission: sound like you? Please register your interest here.
Watch this space for further announcements and follow #ourfuturegroup on social media.
Big Data: Past, Present and Future
Big data.
It’s a phrase you’ve almost certainly heard of, but few understand it’s real potential. More specifically, few understand its real potential to do harm.
Big data is the “macro-economic” view. It’s the collective interpretation of all the individual items/records into a summary/distilled soundbite. As a basic hypothetical example, 80% of people who eat an apple a day have better than average health.
On the face of it, big data has huge potential. If the statistic above is true, then all we need to do is eat more apples and we all have better health. But there lies its simultaneous weakness. If absolutely everyone ate an apple a day, the average health of the population overall increases; and therefore the marginal benefit of eating an apple a day disappears.
Most disturbingly of all, the inverse position now becomes true: now, if you DON’T eat an apple a day, there’s an 80% chance that you will have below average health.
So when using big data for decision making, trend analysis, or any other purpose, you must remember the three golden rules:
- Past: your data is collected from things that have happened already. It is not perfect. It is not future proof. It is already old.
- Present: make the right decisions and choices based on what you know and can deduce today.
- Future: embrace change, encourage new thinking, accept you don’t know what will be true. Innovate. Then do it again.
At Future Solutions, when we build advanced automated processing routines for our clients, we always seek to understand before being understood: we want to learn the past. That helps us understand the present: what are the pain points, the frustrations, the peaks and the troughs. Then we provoke dreams of the future: if X were no object, what would be true?
We know however that as soon as we start building the dream future state – in the present – it will soon become the past. As soon as our clients see what their system can now do for them in a fraction of the time it took previously, they start to dream even bigger and what could be possible given their new present state.
And that’s why we do what we do.
And we love it.
Big (data) time.
Is Efficiency Important?
It seems efficiency is increasingly high on the list when people are buying things these days.
From fridges to dishwashers, from cookers to TVs — even entire houses — it feels like everything these days has an energy rating slapped all over it.
People up and down the land are feeling the smugness of having a A+++-rated lightbulb, and the overwhelming guilt of a G-rated portable radiator stuffed in their attic (hidden away from judging eyes of course).
