How to boost productivity? Learn 6 simple productivity hacks for remote teams

If you are reading this article around the time of its release, it’s more than likely that you and your team are working from home. In the time you have been working remotely, do you think your productivity has increased or decreased? We asked this question to our followers on social media and the result was almost a perfect split. Whether you believe it or not, your productivity has been impacted for the good or worse, there are steps you can take to get the most out of your remote experience.
In this article, we highlight some of those steps.‍

Plan out your day

It shouldn’t come to you as a surprise that remote work has blurred the boundaries of professional and personal lives. This change has called for a restructuring of your day as well. When working from home, it’s easy to become very relaxed. Without the routine and structure of waking up, getting ready, and leaving for the office, many people start to do things more randomly. Coming up with a list of things to be done and ensuring all of which is done is imperative to improve your work from home productivity.

With Bottle you can create tasks for yourself and your team and then drop those tasks into a day planner to structure your day. You can also visualize what your team is doing and when.

Create your ideal workspace

It shouldn’t come to you as a surprise that remote work has blurred the boundaries of professional and personal lives. This change has called for a restructuring of your day as well. When working from home, it’s easy to become very relaxed. Without the routine and structure of waking up, getting ready, and leaving for the office, many people start to do things more randomly. Coming up with a list of things to be done and ensuring all of which is done is imperative to improve your work from home productivity.

With Bottle you can create tasks for yourself and your team and then drop those tasks into a day planner to structure your day. You can also visualize what your team is doing and when.

Get rid of WhatsApp for work communication

If you are part of a team that lives in the stone age and still uses WhatsApp for work communication, it’s time to move on. Not only is WhatsApp terrible for work life balance as you are having both personal and professional communication on the same platform, it’s also a weak tool for having asynchronous collaboration with your team.

With Bottle, you can create channels and threads for all your projects and teams to have a more systematic way of working. This allows you to keep a track of your workflow and also enables you to access all your resources from anywhere.

Limit Distractions

One benefit of working from an office is the lack of distractions around you. You are kind of forced to focus on work and there is no scope of doing anything else. That, however, is not the case while working from home. Everything including the people, pets, and things we love can become distractions when working from home. Limiting distractions can be difficult with so many factors involved. Try implementing some boundaries around your established work area. Can you close the door and use a do not disturb sign? Using headphones to drown out noise can also be beneficial. Set ground rules with people for your workaround. Setting ground rules with people around is the next step on the ladder.

Making sure that you are not constantly distracted by family members can fetch you a good amount of work from home productivity. Simply ask them to maintain the same temperament towards your work as of when you are at a workplace. This will help your transition into a productive working from home option in the longer run.

Give your team greater autonomy

Many managers succeed in an office environment because they are physically around people. They can walk over to an employee’s desk, check on them, and ask them questions. If there is a problem, they can quickly huddle up with the team and discuss it. With a remote team, these same dynamics don’t work. With employees being out of sight, you might be tempted to constantly message/have a call with your team on how their work is progressing along. This is the last thing you want to do. Not only are you taking their time to time as they type up updates, but the context switching can also impact their focus.

Instead, you need to evolve your management style by building stronger trust in your employees and giving them greater autonomy. In fact, workplaces that give their employees greater freedom to complete their work experience greater job satisfaction. Millennials in particular seek workplaces with more autonomy, and it’s linked to greater productivity.

Instead of regularly checking in on your employees, define clear goals, deadlines, and updates. Start trusting that your employees can do their work successfully while remote without constant oversight.

Reduce video calls

Zoom fatigue is very real. Spending more time in unproductive video calls that can be often avoided fills up your day and leaves minimal time for deep work. Video calls have shown to be more mentally taxing than in-person meetings and what’s worse is that they make managers feel like they have accomplished a lot but in reality, they haven’t. Despite this, managers still prefer to do calls for the slightest of updates as they feel it’s a more comprehensive way of communicating since you can provide context to stuff easily.

With Bottle, you can schedule the occasional video conference but more importantly, refer to tasks and other work tickets while messaging to get feedback and updates.

Bonus tip: Change out of your pyjamas.

No need to wear full-fledged in-office clothing, but make sure you freshen up and change into something decent. Your clothing helps set the mood and enables you to get in the zone.

If done right, remote working can not only lead to a boon in your productivity but also free up space in your schedule to pursue things that you have always wanted to. The post-covid remote experience is the first of its kind at this scale. We are coming out of the pandemic but remote work is definitely here to stay. If you are reading this blog, it’s likely that you realize the importance of finding the perfect remote work style for you and your team. The only question that remains is whether you are ready to forgo the traditional notions of working and adapt to the times.

If you are looking for the perfect hub for your remote team to manage their work and collaborate under the same roof, you can check out how Bottle can benefit your remote team here.

Originally published at https://www.bottlehq.com.