Home Is Best: How To Organize A Remote Work For Your Business

Thanks to modern technologies, we can forget about borders and time zones. It's a golden time for new business opportunities. Messengers, social media have become an integral part of our lives: often people sitting in the same room prefer to send messages rather than communicating in person.

Remote work became quite a common practice, especially in IT area.This way of doing business has many strengths.

Let's look at the benefits:

However, collaborating remotely involves numerous risks:

So, how to control a team and work remotely with highest productivity?

Here is a list of questions you should keep in mind:

Collaboration and team communication can become messy if managers are not careful. At Serpstat, we use Agile and Scrum techniques to manage global teams and achieve the most productive results. We follow a strict and understandable system that regulates the workflow.

Each sprint begins with a retrospective meeting, which summarizes the results of the previous sprint. The teams analyze successes and failures. Based on this experience, we plan new tasks.

Therefore, it's essential to have all the tools ready to assist remote workers before making the switch.

With remote work, teams need a way to communicate painlessly with each other. E-mail is not the best option, so remote workers should choose the means of communication to stay in touch.

What services can be used to arrange online meetings:

Organization is the key for teams working remotely. It's a great idea to set up a oject management tool that every teammate can access and get the files and data they need at any time. These tools also suggest ways to organize projects between different teams and set urgent reminders.

How do managers know if their remote employees really work? Currently, most managers evaluate their employees based on the number of tasks completed and whether they fulfill their goals or not. However, it can still be difficult to keep everyone on the race. If productivity starts to decline, time tracking tools can be used to monitor projects or simply to estimate how much time it actually takes to make improvements.

Working outside office means that many team members will connect to WiFi networks in cafes, coworking centers and other public places to do their tasks. Therefore, it is important to have an information security policy before moving to remote work. Remote teams should create secure passwords using tools such as LastPass and update them regularly. Confidential information should be stored in a secure cloud storage platform such as Box, and when connecting to public networks you should use a private network such as VyprVPN or FoxyProxy.

In Serpstat, remote work was a rare thing. These were employees from those cities where we don offices or those people who have a temporary need to work from home.

But the crisis caused by the coronavirus forced us all to collect our stuff and settle in quarantine at home :)

It took Serpstat two days to transfer 600 people to full-time remote work. How did we do it?

Plan. The sooner you start planning everything: waking up, phoning, lunch, sports, the better for you and your productivity.

Organize a workplace and "go to work," even if this place is a meter far from your bed. Don't work from the bed or the sofa.

If you don't live alone, you need to coordinate work at home (with loved ones, relatives, friends, pets). Explain that your place of work is changing, but you still work, though, in different conditions. Everyone should understand that calling you to fix something during the day is a bad idea. But sometimes it helps take a different look at the task.

Don't hesitate if you have any problems with your work. The format of communication is changing (there is no access to personal/quick meetings/approvals), but you still need to find solutions quickly. Write immediately to the team manager or colleagues from other departments/teams.

Your phone should always be nearby. You need to turn on the vibrating alert or sound.

Use the rule of 10 messages: if a written discussion is longer than 10 messages, call online or by mobile, decide and fix the agreement with a follow-up.

Have breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the right time.

At lunch, it is advisable to relax and distract from work.

For especially social people, there are virtual offices; you can see all colleagues on a separate monitor.

Gymnastics. We strongly recommend doing exercise at least 2 times a day. If you don't want gymnastics - get busy with household tasks, any physical activity will benefit.

And remember - you don't work from home, you live at work :) Therefore, maintaining a balance turns into an excellent challenge, and the better you cope with it, the more chances you won't lose in productivity.

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