How To Manage Employees That Work From Home? 5 Amazing Tips

At this moment, Work from home has become more than a trend. More and more companies globally are adopting this form and letting their employees work from home. 

For employees, it is a symbol that their employer has faith in them to stay productive, manage their project works, and prevent distractions. 

For employers, it is definitely a challenging task to manage a remote team.

What if something does go wrong?

The fact is, if you don’t know how to handle the work from home (WFH)workers effectively, they may continue to:

• Skip Important calls
• Feeling isolated
• Poorly perform tasks
• Just slack off
• Forget to perform assigned tasks
• Take work for granted
• Misuse the liberty given to them

In this article, we have explained 5 important tips that you must follow in order to avoid this happening and which will help you set up yourself and your team to be successful. 

1) Provide your Employees with the Right Tech Stack/Tools

One of the primary and the major aspects to successfully manage your remote team is to provide them with the right set of tools. Being a manager, it is your duty to make sure that all employees are connected.

You should make sure that your work from home employees must have access to the following

• Communication and Collaboration tools
• A portable device(laptop or a tablet) and A smartphone
• Project management, CRM, and file-sharing software
• Your network remote access

Also, one more thing that is very crucial – your remote employees must have access to the IT support. If in case they face any issues, they can contact them and get it resolved. In order to get the job effectively done, you must take care of these things. 

2) Set Deadlines and Clear Expectations

If it’s a potential recruit or an existing member of staff heading to a remote environment, you should clear and define everything in order to prevent confusion: main assignments and timelines, critical regular or weekly activities and planned meetings.

Especially clear about hours and availability. In brief, make no conclusions as to what functions remotely- address about it directly to the team.

Also mention the scope, deliverables, and deadlines for each project and task on which your team is working on.

Setting deadlines is the most important thing to do in order to efficiently manage your remote team. Your remote employees will work accordingly and will focus on completing tasks at the set time interval. 

3) Keep a Daily Check of your Employee’s Activities

In order to make sure that all your processes and projects are on track and to know if your employees are actually working, you have to monitor your employees.

You can take the help of some really excellent remote employee monitoring software like EmpMonitor. EmpMonitor is an all in one Productivity tracking and employee monitoring software which helps you know the total productive and nonproductive hours of your company.

Also, you can real-time monitor your employees by taking time to time screenshots of their screens. You can even dig out the idle time spent by an employee and can check their logs, browsing history, and a lot more.

One of the best things about this software is – it provides the Insider threat detection and Data leak protection features which keeps your company data secure, and safe. 

4) Try to Communicate a lot

This is very important. You have to communicate a lot with your employees so as to make sure they don’t feel isolated and disconnected. Also, as a manager, you can encourage your employees to have watercooler chats.

Yes! If you have a remote team, you all are obviously physically separated. You need a place to hang out, share new ideas, talk, and have little fun.

If you allow your work from home employees to have such casual or impromptu chats, it helps in preventing burnouts. It also leads people to connect with each other and brings your team closer. 

5) More Focus on Productivity and Output

You should be flexible and should focus on productivity and output rather than their presence. As you know that remote teams work from different places. You should trust your employees and provide them with the freedom to work on their terms.

You should analyze your employees’ activity and compare the output they are generating. Also, one more important thing you should take care of is to appreciate the employees who work really hard and are going beyond their limits to complete the defined projects.

Appreciation and showing consent boost the confidence of your employees and they feel happy and motivated. As a result, they work even harder.

With the above-mentioned tips, you can effectively manage your work from home employees. You can surely improve the employees’ satisfaction across morale, productivity, and cultures.

Rely on communication and collaboration tools, and try to maintain efficient operation of projects. Also, Do not forget to implement remote employee monitoring tools to access and analyze your employee’s activities. 

There’s no denying of the fact that managing remote employees is a difficult task but if you smartly follow the above practices, then no one can stop you from creating a truly united team.