With remote work being the new normal, businesses are realizing the benefits of having a remote workforce lately and looking for ways to keep their crew at home permanently. A remote working system allows the company to hire more suitable candidates regardless of location and provides unmatched flexibility to the employees.

Even though there are technological tools to assist remote workforce management like time tracking software, the communication gaps that businesses fail to address will affect the potential of the remote team. In this article, we shed light on the proven techniques to help you with remote workforce management.

1. Proper Task Allocation

The most crucial aspect of managing a remote team is to derive a perfect work plan for every team member. Failing to assign tasks and broken communication can lead to performance dips. Your team members should have a clear idea about their duties and timelines. Hence, managers are responsible for creating a sound communication channel and assigning measurable and realistic targets to keep the engine running.

2. Initiate Casual Conversations

Another essential communication gap you need to fill as the team manager is the lack of casual conversations. These simple conversations usually happen in the office environment over lunch or coffee breaks. But a remote working team often gets no time for these extempore conversations.

These simple, informal conversation promotes team bonding and gives the employees the much needed time off work. But, most of the remote teams connect over their communication channels only for official purposes. So, promoting casual conversation in team calls can significantly improve the productivity and team bonding of the employees

3. Too Much Freedom is Dangerous

After talking about casual conversations, too much freedom is dangerous to productivity. It's important to be stringent on specific areas to avoid employees getting too comfortable and deviating from the workflow. So knowing where to lose and tighten the grip is very crucial.

4. Track Your Employees

Tracking your team and their work is another important aspect of remote team management you should not take your eyes off. You should be aware of how much work every team member does. Even the employee you thought the most productive would be doing significantly less when you effectively start tracking their work and time. Also, make sure you don't micromanage.

Time tracking software is the best bet to track your employee's time and workload in real-time, and also fraudulent time entries can be identified as you can monitor the exact working hours.

5. Promote Flexible Work Time

The biggest advantage of remote working is the unmatched work time flexibility it offers. Remote workers have the freedom to work at their preferred pace, flexible time, and be more productive than usual. On the other hand, flexibility taken too far could create chaos in the work-life balance of the employee as well as the productivity.

Also, team members working on the same project but on different work hours could be the reason for projects to deviate from the workflow. The communication becomes more complex and broken, and this might lead projects to failure. So it is crucial to promote flexible work timings for team members so that everyone can be on the same page. This can be achieved by overlapping few work hours of team members on the same project so that business-critical information can be transferred effectively.

Conclusion

Remote work may not be as beneficial to certain businesses and industries; many organizations are reaping significant benefits. For remote work to be a success, organizations must streamline their communication and have essential tools like time tracking software in place.

Likewise, should you find yourself curious to see how time tracking software could improve your remote workforce management capabilities, we recommend starting with ArcTimeTracker by Archarina, an intuitive, online tool to help your business track and manage employee time, activity, and productivity. Learn more by visiting archarina.io or requesting a free demo.