Overcoming Common Remote Work Challenges

We have all been struggling to adjust to our new remote work norm. While remote work did get rid of having to deal with rush hour traffic, it’s not without its own set of challenges. One report found that while employees can be more productive outside of working in a conventional office, they are more susceptible to working longer hours, keeping up a more intense work pace, struggling to find a balance between work life and home life, and in some cases suffering from greater stress. 

These are just a few ways that you can help your team overcome some common remote work challenges. 

Project Management

One of the biggest challenges that come with working from home, is being able to manage projects effectively while your team is located in multiple locations. Whether your staff is partially in-house or fully remote, managers are still responsible for handling deadlines and targets.

Without being physically together, communication can become more difficult and keeping track of where individuals are progressing can be almost impossible, especially if you have complicated projects with large teams. 

This can be handled quite easily by finding the right tool or software to help you assign tasks and keep track of project progress. There are many different options available. Most of them typically have trial periods so you can test them out before you commit to one. After you find the perfect tool for your workflow, you’ll just need to make sure your management stays on top of things. 

Remote Collaboration

A common challenge that comes with remote teams is collaborating from multiple different locations. How can a team efficiently collaborate when they are spread throughout the country or even the world? When team members work from the same physical location, like an office, they are able to interact with each other with documents, items, projects or each other without any real barriers or limitations. 

While working remotely, teams are pretty limited. Even interacting with the same document can pose a significant challenge. The good news is, just like project management, there are several different collaboration tools that are designed for any kind of task which will help you break down any co-working barriers.

We recommend that you first look for an effective communication channel for you and your teams. Email can be too slow or cluttered for remote communication. There are other channels that are instant, responsive and adaptable to suit any of your needs.

Task Tracking and Productivity

This is one of the more complex challenges that managers can face with their remote workforce. In order to hit your big goals and targets, you need to ensure that all of the little tasks are being completed promptly. Needing to keep track of the progress of many remote workers on a daily basis can be a huge challenge. 

Many project management tools will be able to help you see when team members start and complete a task, but you will only be able to see this information after the fact. Meaning that you won’t be able to get live feedback or understand how productive your team members are during the time they are working on tasks. 

There are real-time project management tools that can help you see what everyone is currently working on, with features enabling your team to “check in” to share how far along they are on any given task. 

If productivity is something you have been struggling with, then you can check out tools that help you track how long a task takes. Tracking completion times will allow you to create benchmarks so you can maintain and improve turnaround times, and pinpoint any issues that get in the way. The data can also show you which tasks an individual team member is most time-efficient with, which allows you to assign certain tasks to the most suitable member on your team.

Employee Training

Remote work can also interrupt any plans you had when it comes to onboarding or upskilling your current employees. When adding a new team member, you must have an effective training program that keeps your employees engaged. Of course, there are also emerging technologies that can help support your employee training regimen that come in all shapes and sizes. However, a gamified training platform like 1Huddle is a cost-effective way to meet your employees’ learning needs whether they work remotely or not. 

At 1Huddle, we offer cloud-based employee gamification software that can easily adapt to any employee training or gamification strategy you want to implement at your workplace. You can customize your content for a seamless experience and all of your employees will be able to access their training anywhere, anytime and at the push of a button. You can use our  gamification platform to measure their performance and make key decisions on where you should take your gamification strategy next. 

Do you want to learn more about how 1Huddle can help you level up your own workforce? Request a demo today.