If you have any business, organisation, or startup running, the goal for you at the end of the day is high productivity. Right? However, what if you have more and more remote teams and employees?
When it comes to managing them, or these teams doing self-management, they obstruct concentration and productive workflows. So we need to get rid of these problems, such as work-life balance issues, fast. However, you alone can’t physically reach out to each employee. Well, your workplace productivity software can.
The 5 Challenges with Remote Team Management
Managing remote teams is much different than handling in-office staff, teams, and employees. As we mentioned before, there are many challenges that obstruct focus, efficiency, and productivity. Here are a few major and common ones.
1. Communication Barriers
The first thing to understand about your remote teams is that they can be working from anywhere. That is, even from different nations. This brings the issue of varying time Zones. For example:
- 3:00 PM in India is 8:30 PM in Australia. Imagine how confusing and complicated it can get for your dispersed employees.
- Another issue is network problems at certain places, which also stall proper communication.
2. Less Data Security
Another reason most organisations allow remote work and work-from-home is to save expenses. However, at what cost? Since your remote employees and teams use their own devices for work, they will:
- Want to use their anti-virus, protocols, and firewall. You can’t trust your organisational data with these security systems.
- Another issue is that there is no one monitoring the employees for any signs of data breaches or insider threats.
So, you must be thinking about allowing your remote teams to use your organisation’s work devices from their location. However, think about all the expenses that you can incur if they somehow damage them.
3. Work-Life Balance Issues
Maintaining work-life balance during remote or work-from-home is a very hard thing to do. The reason is that the place of work and the place of living are the same. You can, though, allocate remote offices, but your employees may have to bring their families along for any reason. What you need to understand is that:
- Remote work causes many disturbances and interruptions in work, including outside noises and nagging from kids.
- Your employees may have to provide some time to their families during working hours, which can be problematic.
Overall, keeping family and work life separate is tough in remote work settings. That’s the sole reason behind employees experiencing burnout due to a lack of work-life balance.
4. Complex Payroll & Benefits
Here’s a remote work management challenge that employers face. In simple words, complexity in providing payroll and benefits arises due to geographically distributed teams. The issue is that there are different tax laws, currencies, and regulations that you need to comply with. This is already hard. However, what if the remote teams are large?
5. Complex Compliance Maintenance
Maintaining the different labour laws and regulations across the nations where your global employees are is yet another issue. Errors here can result in you getting fined heavily. You know why and how it works.
An Overview of Workplace Productivity Software
Are the problems we discussed above giving you tension? Not anymore. Your workplace productivity software solution provides many features and functionalities to track the work patterns of your remote teams and employees. However, not only that, but the software also does the same in real-time while keeping a check on data security with integrations.
7 Benefits of Workplace Productivity Software for Your Remote Teams
Implementing workplace productivity software in your organisation will be beneficial for your remote teams and employees in many ways. Here are 8 of them to begin with.
1. Enhanced Communication
- A feature of workplace productivity software is communication tools. It is either via integration or built-in functionality. What this does is ensure that your remote teams can communicate in real-time without the need for complicated emails and chats.
2. Better Collaboration
- Collaboration tools help your remote teams collaborate across departments on projects, which ensures that everyone is updated and in sync with the progress.
3. Optimized Workflows
- Workplace productivity software also ensures that everyone knows what to do and when with workflow automation and accuracy.
4. Work-Life Balance
- Advanced workplace productivity software provides you with features of employee scheduling software as well, which lets you set schedules for your employees and teams, giving them ample time to also adjust their errands. This improves focus as there is an improved work-life balance.
5. Improved Project Management
- Workplace productivity software provides you with accurate reports on the project’s progress and flow, which lets you manage resources and time accordingly to achieve success.
6. Decreased Expenses
Workplace productivity software keeps your data secure with the same security protocols for every device. Since it can be remotely installed from anywhere, it also doesn’t take too much setup time. Furthermore, you can also prevent insider threats by identifying unusual work patterns in the productivity reports.
7. Positive Employee Morale
- Due to improved work-life balance, employees also work with positive morale and enhanced work engagement.
Top 10 Workplace Productivity Software for Your Remote Teams
These are examples (names only) of the finest 10 workplace productivity software for managing your remote teams.
- DeskTrack
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom
- Asana
- Trello
- Basecamp
- Google Docs
- Microsoft Office Online
- Time Doctor
Conclusion
With that being said, we are done putting our post for today’s title, How Workplace Productivity Software Helps Remote Teams Stay Focused, under wraps. As a final word, we can say that remote work is a pro as well as a con. It’s an advantage for employees and employers as they get to experience flexible schedules, decreased costs, and comfort while working.
However, when it comes to managing remote teams, there are various complications, including work-life balance issues. To solve these problems, you need some sort of productivity monitoring software.
