Remote work is great because it offers flexibility, freedom, and independence to its employees. You get to choose where you work, when you work, and with whom you will work.

Still, this autonomy is not all rose gardens and butterflies. Working from home, especially as a team, can at times be stressful. You’re faced with a long line of distractions – from your kids to your pets or even your kitchen.

Team members find themselves struggling to keep up with their tasks which often leads to feelings of burnout and low quality of output.

To stay as efficient as Elon Musk even while working from home, here are 5 actionable strategies:

1.     Encourage the Use of Dedicated In-Home Workspaces

A dedicated in-home workspace is an excellent way for employees to maintain their efficiency in a remote work environment, It helps reduce distractions so employees can focus on their tasks without worrying about what’s going on around them.

Up until the pandemic hit, most employees had no dedicated working space at home and were forced to use couches and kitchen tables for work.

Encourage your employees to create a distraction-free zone where they can enjoy peace and quiet when it’s time for work. This designated space will serve for tasks, meetings, or collaborative activities.

Employees should remove any unnecessary furniture and distractions from their workspace so they have plenty of room for work activities. This will help keep things clean and uncluttered so that productivity stays at a maximum.

2.     Give Your Teams the Right Tools to Work With

It’s easy to lose sight of your company goals when you don’t have people sitting in a room together, but the right tools can help keep your teams on track and aligned.

There are a lot of tools you can use to help your team collaborate more efficiently. Some are essential:

Screen sharing and video conferencing — Share your screen with other team members so they can see what you’re doing in real-time. Video calls are essential for meetings and working sessions. Investing in a tool like Zoom can go a long way.

Slack — Allows you to communicate easily with your team members while keeping track of different conversations happening at once. You can set up channels for different topics or projects and invite specific people into each one so they can contribute their thoughts without getting lost in a sea of messages.

Document management software — Great for collaborating on documents because it allows multiple people to edit pdf files,  edit pdf text, or other file types at once without overwriting each other’s changes or losing their place in the document.

An active Internet connection is another important tool to consider offering to team members working from home.

3.     Check-In Regularly or Daily with Your Remote Teams via Video Conferencing

Having a regular check-in session with your team is one of the best ways to ensure that everyone is on the same page, especially when it comes to managing expectations in a remote work environment. It allows you to keep an eye on things from afar.

In a remote work environment, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. By checking in with your remote teams on a regular basis, you can make sure that everyone is moving in the same direction, and that no one has fallen behind.

Video conferencing tools like Zoom are easy to use, secure, and can be used from any device with an internet connection. You can also record your meetings so that there’s no confusion about what was said or done during the meeting later on.

4.     Adopt Some Flexibility in Your Definition of Working Hours

One frightening issue with remote work is time zone differences, which can lead to effectiveness issues if you don’t account for them.

One way to overcome this is by adopting some flexibility in your definition of working hours. For example, if you have an employee who lives in Australia and works remotely from their home office, it would make sense for you to allow them to start work at 5 pm local time (which would be 10 am EST).

They could then take a break at 1 pm and start again at 3 pm local time (which would be 6 pm EST). This means they can get into the same rhythm as their colleagues without taking up everyone else’s lunch breaks or leaving early most days.

This approach might not work for everyone, but it does illustrate how flexible working patterns can help maintain efficiency in remote work environments.

5.     Document Management Software for Remote Teams with Lumin PDF

It is important for remote teams to have a clear structure for their work processes: who does what, when, how, etc. It’s also important for remote teams to keep track of all their work documents and perform a text edit online.

To do this, you need a document management tool like Lumin pdf that helps you organize your tasks and all the related files in one place, so you can easily find them when you need them without having to search through tons of folders on your hard drive or email inboxes.

When working with a remote team, you need to ensure that the communication is at its best. A document management application can help you achieve this.

With Lumin pdf you can keep track of changes made to the files by different members of the group, and edit pdfs. Multiple team members can Collaborate on one document in real-time: edit online, drop comments, provide feedback, add media files, and even digital signatures.

Lumin online pdf editor also allows you to make a fillable pdf and supports seamless integration with Google Drive and other essential tools to facilitate collective work. An all-around document management software is essential for productivity in a remote work environment.

Conclusion

The one challenge with remote work is how difficult it is to get things done when you’re away from your team. Use the strategies discussed in this article to help your team maintain acceptable levels of efficiency while your company enjoys the cost and operational benefits of remote work.