Key Takeaways:

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•  Setting strategic goals for individuals and teams is a great way to create a cohesive work environment where everyone is moving in the same direction.
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•  Provide your remote teams with the digital tools, such as remote desktop monitoring software, they need to do their job efficiently.
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•  Streamline your onboarding process with clearly defined documentation and processes.

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Read time: 6 minutes

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Many of us have become accustomed to the concept of working from home by now - it’s no longer a fleeting trend. Many of us have managed to adjust the way we work and are now successfully logging in remotely every workday. 

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Even though many people are looking forward to going back to the office, some companies are looking to make remote work a long-term solution. 

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If your company is one of them, you are likely wondering how to keep things running smoothly with all your employees scattered around your city, country, or possibly the world. Is it possible to retain the higher standards you held in your company? 

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If you know how to monitor work from home employees, we would argue that it absolutely is.

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Here are eight ways you can streamline your remote business and keep things running smoothly while retaining higher standards with computer monitor software.

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1. Set Regular Goals

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One of the best ways to have your workday run smoothly is to plan it in advance. Planning in advance is crucial as you never know what will come up and derail you from your path. 

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To prevent this or at least minimize the damage, you need to set a schedule and specific daily goals. 

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You can set goals according to:

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• Individuals
• Teams
• Company initiatives 

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As far as the schedule is concerned, make sure that all your employees are aware of the importance of setting it, but let them do it on their own, as you cannot possibly know what works for everyone.

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If you are scaling up and are setting goals for a specific team or the entire company, you should have a meeting each morning where you discuss and write up the goals. When you are setting goals on a larger scale, it is not easy to estimate how long it will take your employees to complete their tasks. 

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To successfully estimate everyone's time, you need to learn how to monitor work from home employees. The best way to do this is to use employee monitoring software like Insightful. With Insightful, you can effortlessly keep track of your employees and the work they do. Only by knowing how to monitor employees who work remotely will you plan out everyone's daily goals successfully.

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Pro Tip: One of the easiest ways to set daily goals is to set aside a few minutes at the beginning of each workday, write all your tasks, and how much time it will take you to do them. This will help you reduce the gaps in your day and easily track your daily goals. 
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2. Leverage Digital Resources for Efficiency 

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Today, when almost all businesses are trying to move their operations from the real world to the digital one, it is crucial to provide your employees with as many resources as possible. 

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Make sure they have access to all the tools they need, be it Slack for communication, Trello for productivity, or Insightful for personal accountability and time management.

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Providing your employees with resources will help make remote work easier for them. At the same time, you need to stop forcing inconvenient processes on your employees, as that will only slow them down and make it harder for them to adjust to permanent remote work. 

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By cutting out complicated procedures, you will quickly see how your workflows will become more streamlined. This is why it’s important to regularly review and refine your processes to make sure you’re working in the most optimal way possible.

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3. Embrace Automation for Scalability

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One of the best ways to streamline your remote business is to automate your team's work as much as possible. This will structure your work and save you time that you would usually spend on meetings and back-and-forths. 

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The best way to automate parts of your business is to do it gradually, instead of all at once. To automate, you first need to pick out which aspects of your business are suitable for automation and then think of how you can implement automation in your processes. 

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The most popular apps for automation are Zapier and IFTTT. Zapier works with open and pre-built APIs that connect many of the most popular software. IFTTT is a simple automation tool that works on an "if this, then that" concept. Look into both apps and see which one works for your exact case.

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4. Demonstrate Flexibility

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One of the reasons why so many people love working remotely is the flexibility it usually allows. If you are transitioning your company to a remote way of working, consider introducing a flexible working schedule. A flexible working schedule will help your employees work better as they will be able to adjust their work schedules around their lives instead of the other way around.

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With a flexible schedule, you should focus more on your employees' performance and the results they achieve, instead of the time they spend working. If your employees can finish all of their tasks in six hours instead of eight, why would you force them to stay the extra two hours? There is no need for that.

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5. Unify Communication Tools

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There’s no doubt that while remote work has largely been a net positive for many businesses and employees, it has created new challenges to overcome.

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One of those challenges is how to stay in touch with team members when you might be in different time zones and in different parts of the world.

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As remote workforces grow more and more fragmented, it’s easy to lose communication and, as a result, cause complications in the business.

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One of the best solutions for this is to bring unified communication tools into the equation. When you centralize team communication using platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord, you can effectively promote real-time conversation between team members.

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This can help to keep communication fast, and streamlined.

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For day-to-day meetings, using tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams can have a huge impact. They can effectively replace in-person meetings and help everyone on the team stay in touch and on task.

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6. Establish Policies and Procedures

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If you want everyone in your remote business to be singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s essential that you establish clear policies and procedures.

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That means drawing up detailed SOPs (standard operating procedures) for all important tasks. The good news is that even in a remote work environment, you can easily store and share these SOPs with your teams.

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How?

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With a file storage/management app, such as Notion, Dropbox, or Confluence. Alternatively, you can create a knowledge base that team members can access on a project-by-project basis.

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Then you can provide regular training that walks new employees or team members through these SOPs and opens the floor to feedback and discussion.

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It’s also important to set clear expectations so nobody is in doubt as to what their responsibilities and goals are. Lay down the groundwork for deadlines, deliverables, and general expectations to make sure all team members are on the same page.

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7. Streamline Onboarding for Freelancers

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If you run a remote business, there’s a good chance you’ve tapped into the freelance talent market once or twice before. 

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And why wouldn’t you?

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With access to an unlimited amount of specialized talent from around the world, it makes sense to bolster your workforce - either in the short term or long term - with the right freelance workers.

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If you do decide to go this route, though, you need a streamlined onboarding process.

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Here’s what that might look like:

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• Providing access to important documentation like SOPs and project files
• Educating freelancers on your work values and brand voice
• Using multimedia resources such as videos and interactive guides to get them up to speed with how your teams work

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Ultimately your onboarding process will depend on your specific business and how you work. But for freelancers, you should assume that they’ll have little to no prior experience of your company (unless you’re a large enterprise) which means you need to make every effort to get them up to speed as fast as possible.

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Use a variety of resources to accelerate the learning process, and to accommodate various learning styles. Some will prefer reading PDF guides while others will respond best to instructional tutorial videos.

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8. Implement Collaborative Software

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Opening communication lines in your remote business is one thing, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that this will automatically guarantee effective collaboration.

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If you want your remote team members to gel and work well together - considering some of them may be freelancers too - it’s important to put the right systems and processes in place.

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Since employees will nearly always drop to the levels of the systems you put in place, it makes sense to set your systems up for collaborative success.

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The quickest way to do that?

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Choose the right collaborative software.

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Here are some examples of different types of collaborative tools that teams use to work together effectively:

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• Miro - allows team members to brainstorm ideas together in a virtual setting
• Figma - makes virtual design collaboration possible for creative teams
• Trello - provides project management features for efficient team workflows
• Notion - lets you create custom workspaces that host relevant project information
• GitHub - offers code management solutions for real-time editing and changes

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The right tool depends on the type of work your teams do, so if you manage various departments, it makes sense to invest in different software solutions for each.

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You’ll also need to consider how to educate team members on the collaborative solutions you choose. Since it’ll be important when onboarding new members and educating those who haven’t come across the software before.

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Remote Setting Success

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No matter if remote work is only temporary for your company, or if you are seriously considering making remote work a permanent option, you need to be flexible and make adjustments to the way you work if you want to succeed.  

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Streamlining your operations and workflows is crucial if you want business to boom in a remote setting.

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Updated on December 27th, 2023