At the end of the day, productive teams are usually profitable teams. The question is, how can you maximize productivity – even when you’re running a remote team that doesn’t have the luxury of interacting in a face-to-face manner.

The Challenges of Remote Team Productivity

Remote teams offer a lot of advantages, including cost savings, higher morale, and an ability to recruit in a larger geographical footprint. However, there are distinct challenges when it comes to efficiency and output.

Here are three specific factors that typically impact productivity:

• The way in which people share thoughts, ideas, and information directly impacts a project’s pace. If communication is spotty or non-existent, tasks are more likely to slip through the cracks and/or require additional work.

• It’s often hard for employees and team members to fully grasp what the expectations are for individual roles and projects. This can slow things down and create extra work for others.

• It’s a lot more difficult to hold people accountable when you don’t see or talk to them on a daily basis. And when accountability slides, so does the speed and quality of work being completed.

When you proactively address each of these three areas of concern, you can streamline productivity and enjoy the best of all worlds.

4 Helpful Productivity Tips

As you think about how to amplify productivity, you may find the following tips helpful:

1. Assign Ownership

If everybody is responsible for something, nobody is responsible for it. You can’t give everyone on your team the charge of seeing that a task gets done. Nobody will step up and handle it. Instead, you need to assign ownership to one person. They can delegate, but it’s ultimately their responsibility to see that it gets done.

Develop a culture of ownership, and you’ll see productivity soar to new levels. You’ll get even better results if you tie ownership duties to incentives. Also, non-monetary incentives tend to do better than monetary ones – so this doesn’t have to be expensive.

2. Hold Daily Standups

Excessive meetings will destroy productivity. However, there is a case to be made for holding daily standup meetings. These are quick 10-15-minute meetings where your team gathers on Zoom, and you hash out everyone’s tasks and responsibilities for the day. There’s no chit-chat or off-topic conversations here. It’s purely business.

In these standups, use an online note taking app to record the minutes. Then send these notes out to each team member so everyone knows what they’re responsible for that day.

3. Keep Communication Centralized

There are so many good remote communication tools these days. And while that’s ultimately a good thing, it also creates challenges. With so many different platforms and channels to choose from, communication often becomes fragmented. If you aren’t careful, employees can become overwhelmed by an onslaught of emails, text messages, phone calls, Slack messages, direct messages, project management notifications, etc.

For best results, keep communication centralized to just one or two platforms. For example, all internal messaging occurs within the project management app, while all external communication happens via email. You’ll have to decide what makes the most sense for your team.

4. Set Goals and Track Results

Productivity can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It’s important that you zero in on what it means to you and your team. The best way to do that is by attaching metrics to it.

For example, if productivity is defined as the number of sales calls people make, you might set a quota of 100 sales calls per salesperson per day. You could zoom out further and set a team threshold of 300 sales calls per day.

The key is to set a specific goal with a number and time constraint. Then you have to track against that goal. If goals are being met with ease, you might increase the target. If the goal isn’t being met, dig in and find out why. 

Give Your Team’s Productivity a Boost

Don’t blame your team for a lack of output when you haven’t properly set them up to be successful. Take some time to reevaluate your current processes and look for opportunities to implement some of these productivity tips. You might not see overnight results, but progress will follow.