Employers have a big dilemma when managing remote staff. How
do you know your people are actually working? On this video
I'm going to cover some of the strategies that we use to manage
this challenge in a business that's been working remote for
over six years with a team of over 60 employees all over the
world. And today, we're going to talk about how you can actually
even know what's going on with your team. And, you know, for
me, as a business owner, I've been in business a long time,
there was always this deep, deep fear, in the back of my mind,
how my team actually working is my company actually productive.
And it's not just because I'm a micromanager or I want people to
like slave their way through their work with me, you know,
it's my responsibility to make sure that my business is
productive and efficient, and make sure that the business
actually survives. And if we have team members that are not
actually performing, well, then that's going to begin to
introduce risk to the business. And so I'm going to share with
you a couple of the strategies and a couple of the ways that we
approach this challenge, having run a remote business for more
than most. Now, over the last couple of years as the pandemic
hit, most people transition to some kind of flexible working in
their businesses, whether that was you sending everyone home
and going completely, fully remote, or it may have been just
introducing more flexible working. Now, at the time of
recording this video, the pandemic is starting to kind of
like chill out quite a bit. And many people have returned to
offices, but things have forever changed, the matrix has been
unplugged for everyone. And you know, many people don't want to
go back to the old way of working. And so we're in this
reality, where we have the challenge of employees working
from home, probably at least some of the time in every single
business. And we have managers who have the challenge of
managing productivity and managing workload. And you know,
how do we reconcile when you don't have someone in front of
you whether or not they're actually getting their work
done. Now, most business owners immediately start thinking
about, well, how can I monitor? And how can I track this, you
know, doing things like installing apps on their
computer that track people's behavior, you can have, you
know, an app that will measure like how many keystrokes per
minute people are doing, and whether or not people are
actually clicking in different areas of the screen, and they
can even take screenshots of their work every couple of
minutes and send it back to a central location. Personally,
I'm not really a fan of those, because to me, I think it
creates a bit of a culture of fear. And I think it also
creates a culture that you don't really trust your team to do
their work. And you know, for many people, they will be
challenged by that, particularly if you're, you know, working
with a hybrid team, and you have international team members in
different countries. And you know, for some of those
countries where you have a culture of people working more
than one job, or there's a, you know, a virtual assistant kind
of industry, where people are more likely to be taking more
than one role at different businesses, because they've got
different freelancing gigs kind of going on. You know, that's,
that's a pretty understandable and immediate solution, you
know, how can we just track things as much as possible? I
would say personally, avoiding anything that's coming from a
frame of control, and instead trying to come from a frame of
empowerment as much as possible, is going to make the most sense
for your business. And I know that's been successful for us
running quite a large team remotely for many years. Now,
it's not to say that we don't track anything, something really
important for us to track is hours worked. And we use an
application for that it's a time billing application. And at the
moment, we happen to use an app called kaka phi. And that rounds
is a little plugin inside Google Chrome. And we deploy that to
everyone's account automatically by our Google workspace
administration panel. And from there, we asked our team members
to log what they're doing in their different work projects on
a specific project inside the time management app. Now, that's
really useful, because it's, you know less about control and
distrust, and more about, hey,
do you mind just letting us know what you've got up to, and I
would kind of put that akin to what a manager would usually do
during the day, you probably set up some tasks for your team at
the start of the day, and you check in during the day, or
maybe at the end of the day, or maybe you know, if you're a bit
more lenient with your team, and they're a bit more in the groove
of working with you, you might check in with them just a couple
of times a week on a task that they're working on. Now, what I
love about using time billing software for this is it's
voluntary for the team to report what they're working on. But
then as a leader or as a manager, you get the opportunity
to actually review what work they've said that they've done,
similar to a kind of timesheet, and that allows you to, you
know, analyze with your magical leadership skills, whether or
not you think that's actually a fair timesheet that's been
submitted. Now, these are pretty much the norm in creative
businesses in architectural firms. If you're a law firm or
an accounting firm, you're probably used to doing this kind
of thing already. So you may already have a system like this
in place. But the important thing here is the synthesis
between the actual time data being built and load and the
work being delegated. And what that means is, you're not just
looking for the number at the end of the week, what you're
trying to work out is okay, well, based on the amount of
time billed to the different projects, or the different
project categories, does that seem like a fair amount of work
that's actually being done for those team members working
remotely. And that's where the art of good leadership and good
management comes in, for the seniors in your business,
whether that's you or if you have other leaders as well, to
work with your team in ensuring that you're on the same page. My
next top tip is to have clear KPIs for your team, making sure
that these are measurable, they're easy to understand, but
also they're going to have the right kind of impact in your
business. Now, we use a number of tools to collaborate with our
team and ensure that we're in good communication when we're
working remotely. So we use a sauna. For tasks, we obviously
use Google workspace for all of our communication and
collaboration around scheduling around holding meetings around
chit chatting with each other. These are all ways that we keep
technology tools in place to stay connected with our team.
But we also use Google Data Studio. And we've built a
business dashboard for all the KPIs in our business. Now, KPIs
aren't necessarily something that you would track day to day,
but in the cadence of your business, whether it's weekly or
monthly reporting, you can use KPIs to track the performance of
team members. And one KPI if someone isn't a time billing
type role might be the hours that they've built towards their
time billing. But another KPI for perhaps a salesperson might
be the number of calls or interactions they've had with
customers, and probably their conversion rate on their deals
or relationship conversions that they've been working on. Now
from that data, it's pretty easy to see if you have an outlier in
the data, as long as you have multiple team members working in
that area of the business. And so having solid KPIs that the
team need to report on regularly, can give you the
insight that you need without needing to focus on the Command
and Conquer control frameworks and control strategies. Finally,
the best way to have your team working diligently with each
other is to actually have a culture of the right kind of
work that you want a culture of honesty, a culture of diligent
work a culture where you have built intrinsic motivation for
your team members to actually have pride in their work and
want to show up to work and want to do a really great job. Well,
what that means is that you're more likely to not have to do
any micromanaging of your team at all. For you, as the business
owner or business leader, you want to make sure that you've
got each team member in the right seat of the bus for them
to work to their strengths. And when that happens, and you have
a business that is led with mission and vision and values
and you have alignment of the right people and the right
strategy and the right mission and purpose. Well, you're going
to find it's going to be much easier to keep everybody on the
same page, and not have to worry about whether or not people are
actually working. businesses that have teams that have strong
bonds in culture, or businesses that always perform better.
Whether you're working in an office, or remotely, it's going
to work better if you've got a culture where the team want to
do a great job, and you all succeed together. If you're
interested in learning more about motivating your employees.
Well, I just recorded a video on precisely that what the top four
motivators are for employees. And if you're new to this
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