Being able to perform your professional activities from anywhere is a hot topic. There are several advantages for companies and their employees, but processes and methodologies must be aligned. What little is said, however, is about the biggest challenges of remote work.
Although working at home seems cozy and you make your schedule, it’s hard for most people to get organized and feel challenged to deliver tasks. There are so many challenges for those who work remotely, however, there are also solutions that GitScrum will help you increase productivity at home.
GitScrum looks to help freelancers, small business owners, and remote workers especially. To put aside all questions and doubts on remote work, you will find a few challenges and what solutions you can put on the table.
After you read this article, you will find out what are the biggest remote work challenges and what solutions you have to increase productivity at home.
Remote Work, a global trend
Remote work is one of the most disruptive trends in the business world, as, even without preparation, it has shown that it has the potential to revolutionize relationships between companies and professionals.
Even though the legislation has left an open door for the return of internal work, interest is common for the continuation of remote work.
There are many reasons to advocate remote work: no commuting, reduced costs, reduced stress,increased productivity, ease of reconciling personal and professional life.
GitScrum has been part of the global trend and helps any remote worker to organize their work-life in a bit. You will not waste time and energy with disorganization and misproduction.
Challenges (and solutions) of remote work
1. Limitation of technological resources and work equipment
There is a lack of technological resources and of adequate equipment for employees. Employees need equipment, quality internet connection, secure tools (communication, file sharing, and storage), and training to learn how to use them.
After all, a technology that may seem too simple and user-friendly for one person may be difficult for another.
At the company, employees have access to the organization’s computers and systems, in addition to appropriate chairs and tables.
Solution: it is necessary to invest in technology and inappropriate tools to fully adapt to the new work model.
GitScrum has the best tools and features to keep all technological resources in one platform. Ideally, the focus is not on costs, but on providing a complete and comfortable experience for all employees. You will find over 100 features that will help you organize, monitor, and create tasks remotely.
2. Poor communication between teams
Good communication is essential for telecommuting to work. Outside an environment in which it is possible to go to the individual’s desk to clarify doubts, the transfer of information can have a lot of friction.
Contact between different departments can be the most hampered by a lack of alignment. After all, depending on the size of the company, in the face-to-face environment, they had little proximity.
In this transition, many may try to opt for already consolidated means such as email or WhatsApp. However, they are not ideal.
First, it is common to lose messages between newsletters and business contacts. Second, there are problems related to content security and the ineffectiveness of mixing personal and professional conversation channels.
Solution:
Exercising empathy among employees is the first action. The first duty is to assume that the colleague is occupied with a more important task or with some obstacle that prevented him.
Also, objectivity is an important part of asynchronous communication. Therefore, make it clear in the first message about everything you need, as directly as possible. That’s where project management tools like GitScrum help you stop miscommunication.
If you use our Boards, you will be absolutely close to your teammates and understand the tasks. Everybody will be able to check what everyone is doing on the boards and what are your tasks.
3. Prioritization of tasks
Understanding what the priorities are doesn’t just apply to message replies. The employee himself also needs to have the ability to self-manage his demands.
The remote-regime worker may struggle with this notion at the start of the remote regime. The more flexible working hours and the organization of hours being freer impose the challenge of concentrating on your “to-dos” and “done” boards.
Solution:
A good remote worker needs to have an entrepreneurial attitude. This means being able to distinguish between the actions that have the most impact on business growth and the actions that the rest of your team members need to do to efficiently continue their own tasks.
To organize yourself according to your energy, you better use GitScrum’s feature tasks, such as Task Type, Task Checklists, Form2Task, among others. They are perfect for making priority tasks a highlight in your day. As soon as you finish them, you will check them and start other tasks.
As the day goes on, you will naturally feel more tired and lose focus. It’s not a lack of skills, it’s something we all have in common, regardless of job title.
4. Lack of motivation and employee engagement
Managers also have one of the biggest challenges of teleworking to be able to motivate and engage employees.
This is because, working remotely, it is a little more complicated to closely monitor the performance of employees and encourage them.
To overcome this challenge, hold daily meetings via video call to talk to employees, give feedback and clarify doubts.
Solution: You will feel more motivated at home with a genuine tool that makes you more productive. GitScrum’s Rock Star Team is a gamified feature that will drive you to challenge yourself to deliver your tasks on time a get a good reward from your company.
Use this feature among teammates and we will see an online competition going on. That’s nothing better than having a smart motivation remotely and feeling pumped up to be part of the company.
5. Information security
The last of the main challenges of remote work is information security. Working from a distance, you need to be even more careful with possible malicious intrusions to your computer. Otherwise, the company could have huge losses.
These claims are confirmed by numbers. The home office is one of the main targets of hackers. The reason is easier access to corporate information, which tends to be more valuable.
Solution: To make sure your work is entirely safe, you will some good software to keep them there. Don’t put them in an unsafe area and lose everything.
For this, GitScrum offers great features as soon as you become a user. You can use our Documents, where you can upload files in a safe space. Also, every one of your team can access them and you can put them online instantly.
Furthermore, you may have our Discussions, where you can, among your teammates, collaborate and share thoughts about this information.
What are the benefits of remote work?
Many of us are currently in this modality due to the obligation. The good thing is that the scenario has made many companies realize that working remotely is possible and that projects won’t stop just because we can’t go to the office.
Now is the time to help people adopt remote working and experience the possibilities that this modality can provide.
Although tools are not the key to a balanced home office, they make the day-to-day and the flow of tasks much easier.
In addition to having a space just for employees, which means that we have access to information and people during all remote working hours.
Focus on results
It is interesting how the definition of work success changes in the remote modality and also changes everything that is used to measure that success. Whereas before the measurement was the hours and the simple presence in the work environment, with remote work we measure the result.
Before the place we were working as a measure, just being there, but with remote work, it’s the progress of the work that counts. After all, either you delivered a demand that day or you didn’t. This develops entrepreneurial and managerial skills in each employee.
Flexibility
Remote access to work allows the team to be formed with people from anywhere, not limited to the company’s headquarters city. This is great because many times the people who have the skills the business needs are not necessarily in the same city as the business.
Autonomy
With the home office, many professionals maintain a more regulated routine according to the hours defined by the company. In other cases, however, the employee can choose their hours and work wherever they want. This is an advantage, but it also brings responsibilities to act differently than if you were going to the company and on time.
In addition, as the remote worker is not close to his co-workers, he goes in search of answers alone, increasing his proactivity in seeking the information he needs.
Optimized contacts
Not having people physically around all the time makes the employee more aware of the need to establish contact with colleagues.
The process of writing a message or planning a meeting, for example, ends up refining thoughts and questions, being more concise and clear. This saves time for everyone interacting.
Are you ready to find solutions to work remotely?
These are the main challenges of remote work. If you already adopt or intend to implement this modality in your company, look at these issues and obtain more adequate performance.
To achieve these results, you can make decisions based on facts in your remote work. Thus, delivering value to companies that provide consultancy, always exchanging information and knowledge with total transparency with GitScrum features.