Company downsizing, job insecurity, economic instability, health woes—there are numerous reasons why employees would pursue a career elsewhere. Many of these are unavoidable although they do save you money from salaries and benefits since you have fewer people to pay.
Then again, you also have to reassign leftover tasks to an already busy team which doesn’t bode well for overall productivity.
Some of your staff might not have any qualms with working longer hours or taking on additional responsibilities. They may even start out strong in tackling their now longer to-do lists, but they may eventually run out of steam, especially if they’re overworked, which will make them unhappy.
You’ll see more of your workers leaving your organisation before the month is over at that rate.
As a leader, it’s part of your job to help your remote employees balance their workloads better.
Results are important but you surely don’t want a burnt-out team in exchange. Staying focused is hard enough without an overly busy schedule to kill engagement and morale.
Here are ways how you, the leader, can help your workers reduce their stress while juggling important work.
Categorise tasks clearly
Make it easier for your virtual staff to identity which jobs to handle immediately and which ones can wait. Discuss with them the tasks they need to complete for the week or month. Apart from the jobs you want done right away, determine those that your employees believe need to be prioritised too.
Next, label them as critical, high, moderate or low priority. You can use different colours for this purpose, e.g. red for the most urgent and white for tasks that can wait until others are done. With this, your team will feel confident that they’re focusing their time and efforts where they’re most needed.
Establish transparent workflows
Get everyone on the same page by making processes transparent. You don’t want people getting stuck on one stage of a project because they don’t know who to ask for details or what kind of work is involved. It’s a waste of time if they have to ask around every time so set a flow they can follow.
Plus, forget about multitasking and create sub-units instead. For instance, A and B are assigned to creation, C and D do the editing, E and F get approval and G sends the output to the client. By delegating tasks to different people, you avoid overwhelming any one person from having them take care of everything themselves. It’s easier to trace each step of the process this way as well.
Learn to be reasonable
Nearly every team has a high-performing employee who is willing to tackle challenging tasks and work overtime. They consistently deliver high-quality results so you tend to rely on them often. Though this makes sense, remember that they’re people who can feel overwhelmed too. Stop piling all the extra work on them and check if someone else is available to handle it first.
Be more understanding towards those who aren’t as productive as others. Realise that everyone has their own pace, although there’s nothing wrong with pushing them to accomplish greater things either. Find out why inefficiencies occur and redistribute the work evenly where necessary.
Keep communication lines open
When a worker has a manager who is willing to listen to their work-related concerns, they’re less likely to be burned out. This is why it is crucial for leaders to establish a relationship with their team where they’re comfortable enough to open up about current assignments.
Not everyone is capable of voicing out their thoughts so provide avenues where they can give feedback anonymously. Maybe you can make a poll or survey on G Suite on what they think about workload distribution. While it sounds simple, it encourages employees to give their opinions rather than suppress them.
Take advantage of technology
Consider investing in project management software to help your employees stay on track. Some of the best tools on the market are Zoho, Teamwork, Asana, Trello, and Wrike. They have different interfaces and features, but they share the concept of displaying details of the entire project to the whole team.
As data is made readily accessible to all who are involved, your workers have greater opportunities to collaborate, share ideas, make changes, and accomplish more on the platform. They can set alerts and send notifications too, so they hold each other accountable.
Finding Organised Remote Workers
Of course, your job would be much easier if your remote employees are perfectly capable of managing their workloads on their own. Top performers like these you can find with our help at Remote Workmate. We provide offshore staffing services so you can spend more time on your business rather than on recruitment and other everyday tasks.
In the meantime, we recommend that you apply the ways we’ve shared above so you can reduce the stress on your existing staff and keep them as productive as possible. Which tip are you going to try out first?
Arrange a call with us so we can talk about your business requirements.
