Remote Workforce Resources
A resource guide for remote managers and employees.
The Remote Workforce
Nearly a quarter of the workforce in the U.S. already works remotely. With this trend on the rise, it’s important to understand the pieces that contribute to building and managing a successful remote workforce.
What is a remote workforce?
Increasingly common in businesses worldwide, a remote workforce consists of professionals who work outside of what is considered a “traditional” office environment — whether that means shared co-working spaces, public areas like cafes, or from the comfort of their own homes.
Work From Home Employees
Whether you’ve been working from home for years or have found yourself newly telecommuting, there are a lot of adjustments you can make to suit the unique demands of working from home.
Make Communication a Key Priority
Compared to working in the office, remote work allows for much more flexibility (both in hours and in schedule), but it also requires more accountability on behalf of employees.
Communication for remote workers looks very similar to that of in-office employees, with a few caveats. Understand that your remote coworkers may be juggling many different tasks at home apart from simply working, so their response times might be different than they would be in-office. This is especially important if either of you happen to be working in different time zones. Tools like Slack and Gmail allow you to set notification alerts to indicate you’d like to “take a break”.
Set Up a Dedicated Workspace
An often overlooked aspect of working from home is how your work environment is set up. If possible, you should strive to dedicate a quiet space for working. This way, when you sit down (or stand up) at your workplace, you know it’s time to get work done. This also means that you can really get away from your work when you need to — just by leaving the workspace.
Find Your Workspace Ergonomics
For long-term health and comfort, employees should consider ergonomic essentials for remote working: the workspace, seating, and computer accessories. Read more in our deep dive into ergonomic essentials.
Use Essential Software
Here are some of the most widely-used applications for effectively keeping in touch with your team:
- Video conferencing: Zoom, Skype, GoToMeeting
- Messaging and communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams
- Projects: Trello, Asana
- Time: ClickTime
Managing Your Time During the Workday
Because your hours may be more flexible and may not follow a traditional workday, keeping track of your time while working remotely is more important than ever. Make sure your time tracking application includes these essential features:
- Stopwatch: Stopwatches help you employees automatically capture start and end times down to the second. This is even more helpful when you’ve got things at home clamoring for attention without losing any accuracy.
- Start/end times: Keep a detailed record of your whole day so you don’t have to second guess your time allocation on projects and tasks with precise start and end times. This is especially important when working from home so your billable hours are precisely tracked.
- Incomplete time entry reports: Keep track of what days you may have forgotten to enter time, or missed logging that last hour of work, to make sure you’re logging a full-day’s work by having your incomplete time entry reports readily accessible.
- Mobile: Having a time tracking software that supports mobile devices allows you to stay in communication with your team whether you’re sitting at, or away from your desk.
Learn How Others Do Remote Work
One of the best ways to garner productivity strategies is to learn from those who have been at it for years:
- Skip Knierim, ClickTime’s Customer Support Specialist, shares a few things he’s learned over the years about the best strategies to get the most out of working from home.
- Morgan Mayer, a remote Sales Executive of 20 years at ClickTime, is a veteran at working from home. Read about how he made his transition to remote work successful.
Managing a Remote Workforce
Currently 4.3 million people in the US work from home at least half the time. If you’re new to managing a remote team, you’ll quickly notice the differences. Your managerial instincts may be muted since you can no longer interact with your team in person.
Regain Visibility
Start tracking remote employee time. The goal is to make both the employee and their manager more aware of what’s actually happening, so both of you can make adjustments and agree on what matters. As the old saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and too few of us fail to measure our work output in any detail.
It starts with a more detailed understanding of what’s going on:
- Which projects are receiving more attention, compared to which should be?
- How many times per day / per week are you interacting with each of your direct reports? Is it enough?
With a strong time tracking system, these metrics are easy to surface to employees and managers alike.
Dive into Detailed Reporting
As a manager with a remote workforce, you may easily lose track of everything that’s going on with your teams and projects. Make sure that you’re aware of what’s happening with the right planning and reporting tools.
- Capacity Planning and Resource Planning: Make sure you’re not expecting an employee to work more than her capacity allows based on other projects she is working on and time off she is planning on taking by using capacity planning.
- Budget Tracking and alerts: Keep a close eye on your budget projects by setting up budget tracking alerts so you can make adjustments as soon as you need to.
- Executive Dashboards: Using a Dashboard that contains all the information you need about your team’s projects allows you to see what they are doing in real-time and which tasks are being worked on.
- Utilization Reports: Track how much time is being spent on clients versus how much time is being spent on internal work (billable vs. non-billable time) with custom utilization reports
Establish Communication Guidelines
If you’re in the office, it’s easy to sidle over to your employees’ desks to take a look at what they’re working on. As a manager, you lose that touchpoint when your employees are remote. That’s why it’s essential to create a clear communication strategy so that team members can maintain consistent contact:
- Be clear about expectations.
- Set core hours (say 10am to 2pm) where everyone is expected to be reachable.
- Conduct daily standup meetings. Working at home can be isolating; get everyone to show up on-time for a daily video call with their team.
Make Your Software Work Together
With your employees out of the office, make it easy for them to track time, communicate, and share their work with one another by taking advantage software time tracking integrations.