By the beginning of April 2020, 81% of the global workforce lived in countries with mandatory or recommended office closures. As usual, employees had to adapt to work from home and tune in to virtual meetings to run a business.
As a manager, it is your responsibility to establish a culture that promotes remote employee engagement by reinventing your team management strategies with a remote-friendly approach.
Staying up to date with your team can be both challenging and time-consuming. Your team spends 60% time on tasks that don’t contribute to meaningful work, such as communicating about work, seeking information, managing changing priorities according to the Anatomy of Work Index.
The Korn Ferry Survey states that over 67% of employees say spending too much time on meetings and calls distracts them from doing productive work. And 89% of employees say they spend at least some time each week on unproductive meetings and audio/video calls.
Julie Morgenstern, the productivity expert, stated in the Harvard Business Review: “You are managing the energy and brainpower of an entire group. [It’s not something you can do] during the cracks of your workday in between your tasks. You must devote time to it.”
People management depends on managers having a clear view of how their team members are getting on with their work. Regular status updates offer managers visibility into the work and hurdle people underneath them face without becoming overbearing.
If you as a manager are struggling to make sure your remote team meetings are useful to everyone involved without wasting time and killing productivity, then this blog is for you!
We’ve put together 6 ways to get daily status updates quickly!
Mandate ‘To-Do-List.’
The psychological effects of a simple list on an individual are flabbergasting. The Guardian research report states that they make us more productive, effective at task completion, and help us break down big projects into manageable chunks.
Combine ‘To-do List’ with the Psychology of Public Accountability
Make the status report of the to-do list and the psychology public accountability by sharing status reports. It will complement the goals of people management by providing visibility and empowering workers.
Curate and Share a Single Update for the Entire Team
While getting status updates from everyone is one way to increase accountability of remote team members, curating, and sharing it with everyone takes it to another level. It also keeps everyone in the loop and helps improve remote team morale as everyone feels like they’re contributing to the team’s goals.
Curating team updates can be a shared responsibility. Team members should take turns collating and sharing team updates weekly. Managers need to keep in mind that since it’s a team update, the focus has to be 100% on your team’s goals instead of individual contributors.
Automate Daily Status Updates
Choose a work management tool that helps you curate and share daily status updates automatically. Using a visual work management tool can help too. Spreadsheets or task lists can be replaced with task boards and Gantt timelines.
Tools, such as Friday, Geekbot, Standuply, Jell, Polly can help automate your daily status update meetings. These automation tools integrate with other work tools to curate individual status updates and share them with your entire team.
Team status update templates can be used in budget constraints restraining automation. Templates bring consistency as everyone follows a single pattern of reporting daily status, keeping communication sharp. It also saves time, eliminating the need to learn a new tool.
Give KISS effect to Daily Status Updates
Daily status updates can be replaced with stand-up meetings for the KISS effect (Keep it Simple & Short). They’re short and fast so that employees can get back to work quickly.
In the stand-up meet, remote teams meet daily to ensure everyone has context for their work. They stand up in a circle in front of their computers and take turns answering three basic questions:
What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
Is there anything blocking your progress?
Stand-up meetings focus on progress and what employees are doing only to encourage team accountability to each other and the plan.
When conducted effectively by managers, they serve as a binder to keep the remote team members well-connected and in touch with each other’s role in achieving the common goal. Bonus, daily stand-up meetings end complaints that meetings take too long.
1-to-1 Meetings are Still Critical for Remote Teams
While stand-up status meetings are a great way to discover progress-blockers, they’re not meant for problem-solving. 1-to-1 meetings with remote team members are essential to finding solutions. You may need to invite more team members who have expertise in solving these blockers.
Keep in mind that working remotely from home presents its challenges. There is a possibility that your team member does not have private space to work & hence many background noises are heard from the home ambiance.
Without active noise cancellation, blunders such as miscommunication can occur during such problem solving & work meetings. The best way to remove this problem is to install a mic noise cancellation software and prevent unwelcome disturbances from the background.
We recommend installing the background noise cancellation software claerityai. This AI software works seamlessly with multiple video conferencing platforms on Windows and Mac systems.
It enables crystal clear audio in all your audio and video conferences. Moreover, claerityai is enterprise software that all your remote team members can easily install at the click of a button.
It is a low-maintenance solution for noise reduction that works securely across your entire user base. It comes with enhanced security as the audio data does not leave the local install, eliminating worries related to the security and privacy of audio communications.
We hope you will get terrific results post-implementation of these 6 effective ways to receive a daily status update from your remote team. Additionally, we recommend conducting weekly updates to check if your team has problems and ask if they need help.
