Fighting Productivity Paranoia and Creating a Stable Remote Work Space

Here to stay and gathering more and more popularity is remote work. Business leaders want to lure many employees back to the office full-time, even if many prefer to keep working remotely until they retire.

Business leaders must combine shifting employee needs with their company’s success, facing a severe recession at the same time, now that it is evident that employees want work flexibility and reject returning to the hustling culture.

One of the main obstacles on your path to overcoming remote work paranoia is so-called productivity, the anxiety that your staff won’t be as active while working out of sight.

You may always rely on the remote tracking tool to follow your distant activities and provide you meaningful data on their performance if you still have this anxiety despite the many studies proving quite the reverse.

Here are some more sensible actions you can take to ensure your remote workers create strong bonds and are quite productive. Let’s first, however, examine data on this subject.

What Do the Numbers Tell Us?

Although companies question if remote workers are efficient, data reveals that they put more effort than those working from offices. Of remote workers, almost 87% say they are more productive than they were a year ago. Simultaneously, the incidence of double-booked meetings rose by 46% per employee while the number of virtual meetings grew by 153% worldwide since the Coronavirus epidemic.

This highlights the stress remote workers multitasking during meetings—that is, writing emails or responding to direct messages—try to get as many chores off their plate as possible.

In spite of all this, 85% of executives believe their staff members are not very efficient. This is the reason numerous companies all around use remote employee monitoring tools like Controlio to acquire objective knowledge on staff performance and production. Stabilizing remote work environments involves implementing effective communication tools such as Controlio, clear workflows, and robust support systems to ensure productivity and collaboration despite geographical distances.

To maximize the benefits of employee monitoring, though, you must be open about the motives behind it and what you wish to accomplish with this procedure. If not, you will produce a counteract and lose the confidence of your staff members, making them phony producers in order to improve the track records.

And this is where the paranoia about productivity starts to show. This is the concern that, despite different productivity metrics showing the contrary, your personnel provide expected results lacking.

Using this monitoring data will assist your staff members cease multitasking, fight distractions, and better manage their time.

Here are a few actions you could do to increase output of remote workers.

Begin Clearly Establishing Objectives

Burnout has grown to be a major problem as 48% of workers and 53% of executives claim they are overworked and exhausted. Establishing well defined priorities and goals can help you fight this major problem.

Clearly stating to your staff what their responsibilities are and what results you want them to produce will enable them to prioritize important chores above menial ones.

For staff, having a clear vision of their work and how it influences general business success and growth means a great deal.

Workers that know their priorities and objectives are 3.95 times more likely to remain in their present roles for at least two years. Regarding employee happiness, they are also 4.5 times more likely to state they are content working for their current company. These actions will help your remote employees to establish well defined priorities and goals.

Create team and personal OKRs matching the corporate OKRs.

Determine NO-KRs—that is, what your team members should not do—like multitasking or context switching—to produce more significant work.

Retention is mostly dependent on constant feedback.

Start requesting regular comments and attentively listening to what your staff members have to say if you wish to show them that you value their opinion and experience.

Although companies can use timely data-based feedback to improve, only 43% of employees say their supervisors want annual feedback. This implies that 57% of corporate leaders hardly ever if ever ask staff comments or opinions regarding their expertise and position in the company.

Actionable employee insights can help you to have a competitive edge and enable you to survive in trying circumstances.

But comments are two-way communication. Apart from requesting employee comments, you should also make an effort and provide regular data-based comments to staff members, emphasizing their performance and hence, additional professional growth. By means of actionable insights derived from remote employee tracking data, you may establish objective, comprehensive employee performance and aid to shape. More importantly, this input will enable your staff to celebrate their successes and overcome obstacles, therefore increasing their productivity and engagement.