Tips and tricks on how to adapt and keep your team motivated in quarantine mode from old-timers.

For a lot of companies, things changed rapidly when quarantine began. Just a few weeks/months ago nobody would’ve imagined they would be put in this position. For the safety of the employees and the customers, offices had to be closed. And what now? How adapt the team? How to keep up the communication and motivation? All these questions appeared for the team leaders that never worked from home.

So we thought of sharing some insights from our Software Development team that has an excessive remote culture. Thinking through we can define technical and mental aspects to the remote working.

Technical aspect

Moving towards ‘work from home’ mode the first step is to make sure that every employee has everything that is needed to efficiently work. If needed help them to form their ‘home office’. It can be bringing the computer from work, desk, buying them quality headphones for meetings. Right ‘home office’ is a big point to the teams’ efficiency, let the employees grab as much “stuff” from the office as possible before it closes. They don’t have to buy monitors and a mouse in the crisis situation.

For many businesses would be important to prepare the VPN fast for the teams’ convenience working with some services.

The second step would be planning the processes. It means finding the software solutions to communicate, build milestones and monitor efficiency. Having a set of easy-to-use collaboration tools is truly helpful when it comes to working with remote employees. The right choice of mobile and web applications will allow you to save a lot of time and effort. When using them, it’s much easier to ensure convenient communication, process transparency, and effective cooperation.

You need clear expectations about deadlines and daily work, especially if your team not used to work remotely. Daily standups via slack, skype, zoom, etc. can help with this. Even simple questions like:

— What are you working on today?

— Do you have any roadblocks?

— What you did today?  (at the end of the day)

Can boost up the efficiency and help plan the activities each day, define the priorities to stay productive.

For our team, we prefer Monday planning and priorities defining brainstorms, daily reports on the activities and Friday outlining the results meetings.

The important thing to consider is CRM system and the right project management software. Remote workers need to quickly be able to get in the loop on projects and be on the same page about efficiency monitoring, naming systems, documentation, tagging, workflow. It should be clear, at a glance, who’s working on what, who had it last, who’s getting it next and when it’s done.
For the enterprise businesses managing a big team and complex workflow, it’s the right time to consider building the custom CRM system and software to never face similar problems again. Maybe it’s time to outsource the efforts. 

Mental aspects

Feelings as isolation and loneliness are unavoidable in the case of remote work. Sometimes it’s hard to feel as a part of the team when you don’t physically meet, it’s a big step towards demotivation. When employees are not motivated, they complete tasks less effectively. That’s why it’s so important to drive their interest and trigger their energy.

In fact, working with remote software developers requires twice as much proactivity and efforts for building a spirit of strong cooperation. The main goal is to find a balance between control, process transparency, and flexibility. 

It’s important to be present for every employee yet to give them the freedom to decide when they can work. Maybe for some ‘’break” looks like walking the dog, or going grocery shopping, cook the dinner at home. For the employers, it’s challenging to appreciate this culture at first. Just give space for the team as long as work is done properly and in time. It’s very important for them to be able to distract and then to get back to work with the ‘fresh mind’. Home and Office are now the equal definitions but it always was a place to rest, gives a mixed feeling, right?

The important point is to support the bond. The best way is to create rituals, new culture. It can be the morning coffee/lunch breaks via skype, online board games evenings, team online workouts, house tours. Just find what feels good for your particular team.

Periodical One-to-ones is also an important tool to use to see if your employees feeling stressed or have trouble communicating, polishing the processes. So don’t miss out on them too.

Outline

The modern conception of traditional workplace changes, as well as the role and responsibilities of a leader. The success of a distributed team largely depends on project management.

Don’t be too strict, don’t push too hard with control, add positivity, and maintain warm relations between your team members. Provide specialists with everything they need to efficiently complete tasks and deliver the best product possible. 

The atmosphere of trust, honesty, and comfort together with adequate management is a winning motivational mix for remote teams.