Businesses overall have gone through so much change in 2020. The fact that technology is important in business has become clearer than ever. With employees working from home, managers are facing many challenges. Everything, monitoring employees’ activities, checking their attendance, maintaining transparency, and building effective communication, has grown more and more complex.
As a manager, it’s time for you to step up and face these challenges head-on. Is remote work good or bad is still a question, but it’s the only way for now and God knows until when. So, the best way to handle it is by using technology to carry out the important employee management tasks, remotely.
Team Collaboration Tools
First and foremost, you need to make sure that all the teams can easily collaborate with each other. For that, you need a strong communication medium, other than email. So, it’s important to choose a tool that checks all the boxes off of your feature requirement list. It has everything you need to make sure everybody can keep you as well as their team posted at all times.
Some of the most popular tools in the market are Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Skype.
You also need to make sure that the tool is not too complex and is easy to get a hang of so that your employees can learn it fast and start using it to communicate with their peers.
So, ask other managers about the tools that are working best for them, try out their recommendations, and choose the one that’s best suits your needs. The right team collaboration tool will be a perfect balance of feature richness and ease of use.
Task Tracking Tools
As a first time work from home manager, you need to keep an eye on the daily tasks of your remote employees. Again, you can use online tools to track who is working on what for the day.
You can also connect your team collaboration tool like Slack with your task tracking tool like Trello.
This way, you’ll be notified in Slack every time someone marks an update on their Trello card so you don’t have to go back and forth to see what’s happening.
Having a clearer idea of everybody’s responsibilities will also help you balance their workload. If somebody is doing a lot more than some other person, you can easily identify the imbalance and even things out.
Employees’ WFH Activities Monitors
Next, it’s crucial for you to start tracking the performance of your employees working from home. For that, you need to watch their activities during work hours and see what they are up to. This remote work thing is going on for almost a year now and there are many online software available in the market to do the job for you. They call them blinking eyes that track employees.
But wait, before you ask all your employees to get down with this idea of installing a software in their systems to track the words they type, websites they visit, and apps they spend their time on, sit them down in a town hall meeting and ask for their permission. Yes, explain to them how this is going to work and make sure everybody’s comfortable with it.
Human Resource ROIs Calculators
Just like any other body part of a business, human resource management also needs technology running through its veins. From calculating the cost of hiring new people to measuring the revenue per employee, HR managers can calculate just about everything with free online tools.
These human resource management calculators can cut the donkey work and help enhance employee engagement and productivity at your workplace.
Don’t spend hours manually calculating employees’ presents, absents, overtime, payments, revenues, and all other things. Just use these HR calculators to automate your human resource operations. There’s a lot going on and you have to keep up with all of it, so make the best use of every free tool and software to make your work easier and streamlined.
Tools for Virtual Social Events
Another major challenge of effectively managing remote teams is keeping their spirits high. Times are tough and you need to take extra care of your employees and how they feel.
You will have to go the extra mile to keep remote workers engaged and excited to show up for work.
So, don’t forget to appreciate their work and ask them how they are doing from time to time. Be open about all the craziness happening in the world and try to make them feel better. Host social events like Netflix watch parties, trivia games, open mic sessions, and Tik Tok challenges to give them a well-deserved breather from work. Just try to give everybody a good laugh in between all the stress.
Closing Thoughts
Times are very uncertain and businesses all over the world are working remotely. Many are considering adopting this thing as the new normal and are exploring the best ways to manage a remote workforce. The managers are struggling with this new role of WFH or remote managers where they have to bring their A-game in using technology to monitor and manage their employees.
There are many online software and tools that can help these managers build effective communication between their teams, watch their daily tasks, monitor their activities, calculate their hours, costs, and performances, and even host virtual social events. The key is to use these tools effectively and sky's the limit for all remote managers.
Keep your employees motivated, engaged, excited, and, most of all, safe.