How to keep your team motivated while working remote?

Remote working is not new especially in the IT industry. Lots of organizations have embraced remote working and have made their teams productive. With the pandemic hitting us, multiple organizations have no choice but to adapt remote workforce.  Organizations faced obviously faced a lot of challenges with their employees. The challenges were both from productivity as well as a motivational angle. Let us discuss a few ways to keep your employees motivated.

• Adapt to the new norm

Remote working is going to stay for a long time. This will continue right after COVID is gone. This helps organizations cut costs, hire talent from multiple locations around the globe, and stay lean. So, we will have to adapt to the new norm of remote working and adapt to it.

• Creating a dedicated working space

You can encourage your employees to dedicate a workspace away from distractions and noise.  This will ensure that they get better productivity. sometimes, you can offer extra incentives to the people for having a dedicated office space.

• Allot and prioritize tasks

There is a lot of discussions to decide the tasks and the priorities while working in the office. However, there are challenges when working in a remote situation. Break the goals into weekly and daily tasks.  Allot the tasks on a daily basis to your teams. Give task completion goals to them and monitor them. Also, prioritize the tasks on an on-going basis and re-assign the tasks to them. This will help you get the work done faster and on-time.

• Tracking mechanism

Trust is important in the organization. Your employees should feel that you believe in them. However, it is important to set up tracking mechanisms that will measure the time and tasks done for the day. This will help in understanding productivity and also in keeping the team on their toes.

• Constant engagement with your employees

You have to communicate with your team on a constant basis. This will help in increasing the bonding with the team. in remote working situations, it is more important that constant communication happens with your team. This constant communication will help you ensure that your team is constantly working during office hours and will set expectations with the employees also.

• Fix mutually accepted expectations

There is a lot of two-way communication that happens in a physical environment when people work in the proximity of the others. However, there is always an unknown element when people would communicate remotely. This will lead to a lot of friction when people are questioned. So, you must have clearly agreed upon expectations with each other. this will help in reducing any friction.

• Giving flexibility

Your employees will be faced with so much household work that will be thrust on them since they are home. They would not have anticipated this when they were away working from the office. You will have to understand this and be a bit flexible on the work timings. However, you can be strict on the tasks to be done on a daily basis and can hold the teams responsible for not completing those.

• Give regular feedback

Every employee looks out for constant feedback from their boss. They expect a pat on the back also when they hear negative comments about their work. So, you have to keep telling them how they are doing because it is very difficult for people to predict what is going on in a remote situation. They will be unable to see any facial or verbal reaction unlike the situation when they are physically in the office with you.

• Provide empathy

Your employees require you to understand them. They are also facing multiple difficulties as much as you are. There is so much of uncertainties going on in the minds of your employees both from an official as well as their personal life. You have to give them a lot of empathy when you would speak with them. This will give them a lot of confidence in you as a manager and will go that extra mile for you.

Conclusion

You can stay ahead of the curve and increase your productivity if you would follow these norms. Your employees will be happy and will have a relaxed environment at work. They will like to work with your organization and with you because of the respect you would give to them and to their privacy. They can take care of their personal work on a day-to-day basis which they were not able to do and also take care of their work. The team ends up being a motivated one to help you fulfill your goals.