5 Challenges to Manage Remote Teams and How Workiom Helps

The trend of remote working is on the upswing. Even before the COVID-19 scare, many companies had adopted remote work culture. Nearly 62% of Americans worked from home (WFH) in 2019.

Image via Owl Labs

The WFH arrangement is not only convenient for employees but also a boon for employers.

Why so?

In an Indeed survey, organizations hiring remote teams have reported:

• 72% higher productivity
• 52% less employee churn
• 57% improved morale
• 50% lower absenteeism

Remote work is the way forward for companies that want to cut costs and boost productivity.

However, not all companies can adjust to this new work mode. Even megabrands like Amazon, Best Buy, and Google rolled back their WFH policies when they noticed a dip in their workers’ productivity when they started working from home. 

Remote work comes with a unique set of challenges, but nothing can be overcome with the right team task management app. 

If you or your team are also struggling to ace remote working, this is the perfect post for you. We will be discussing the main problems associated with remote work and how task management apps like Workiom can help you combat them. 

Let’s get started. 

What Are the Main Challenges for Remote Teams and Workiom’s Solutions to Overcome Them

We are in the midst of the most massive WFH experiment of history, without any warning. This is the dilemma of many companies that are thrust into the remote work culture suddenly due to the pandemic. With little time to prepare their teams with the right tech stack and mindset, they face many challenges. 

Let’s take a look at the challenges remote working teams typically face and how a task management app like Workiom can help them sail through it.

1. Less Access to Information 

Off-site employees often have to take many pains to access business-related information available to onsite peers. Even with shared databases and in-house file management systems, remote workers can experience hassles in locating and accessing files. This can impact their productivity negatively and delay time-sensitive tasks.

With Workiom’s cloud-powered structure, all business data is automatically uploaded to the cloud, from where it can be accessed from anywhere, anytime. Collaboration is seamless since you can share, invite, and sync projects with colleagues efficiently. This way, urgent tasks continue unchecked, and there is less back and forth for permissions, etc.

What’s more?

Managers can regulate access permissions on-the-go and ensure that people have all pertinent information at their fingertips. Not only is the information accessible, but it is also safer, thanks to features like two-factor authentication and advanced permissions of cloud-hosted apps like Workiom.

2. Communication Lag

Managers often juggle many jobs, including task allocation, monitoring, and reporting. And when teams are large, managers can struggle to correspond with team members efficiently. 

If managers spend hours manually checking task status, employee workload, and project pipeline, they would hardly get any work done. They need a task management software solution that notifies them automatically when a task is completed, reaches a threshold, and requires user action. 

Workiom’s automatic notifications are tailormade to meet remote managers’ unique needs. Managers can create custom views to cut through the noise and view each project/task/employee status. Public forms help them collect customer data and export it directly into the app, ready to be processed.

On top of that, Workiom offers customizable templates for most industries and niches. By installing one of their free templates, you can create custom workflows, and Kanban Boards meant for your team’s specific needs.

3. Data Security Risk

When you work in remote set-ups, sensitive business data needs to be shared with scattered teams for smooth collaboration. While data sharing is unavoidable, it can lead to data security risks, like malware attacks, data breaches, identity theft, etc. For clients, data sharing can pose a serious privacy threat and potential legal liabilities. 

The solution?

Use a team collaboration app like Workiom that boasts of superior data security features. As explained before, Workiom offers advanced permissions and two-factor authentication that helps plug data leaks and intrusions. 

With Workiom, you have end-to-end control over your data. You can find, filter, link, organize, export, and modify your data as you want, as long as you have the requisite permissions.

4. Technical Gaps

For technical teams, upskilling is mandatory as well as challenging, especially in remote set-ups. Managers need to impart hard-core training virtually to subordinates working from home. If there is a gap in understanding, productivity can get impacted in a big way. Plus, there is little time to retool workers with tight delivery schedules to meet.

When you use task management apps like Workiom, you can create your project-specific workflows. In your workflows, you can include downloadable media files and track trainee progress. You can draw detailed productivity reports and white-label them according to your branding guidelines.

What else?

You can incorporate team collaboration features to encourage mentorship within the organization. This way, your teams are on the same page all the time and work efficiently towards project completion.

5. Lack of Accountability and Transparency 

In the absence of face-to-face supervision, remote employees may be tempted to slack off now and then. A lack of accountability and transparency tends to breed distrust among ranks. Simultaneously, micro-managing is not a viable option for managers since it eats up too much time.

Since apps like Workiom have native integration with SaaS tools, remote tracking of teams becomes easy and seamless. The tool gathers real-time updates about projects, tasks, and workers. You can set up “if this, then that” custom rules that govern your workflows. They can raise alerts when productivity falls or deadlines overshoot.

Through Zapier, Workiom can import and export data from over 1,500 apps. You can connect apps so that data can be exchanged painlessly to generate well-rounded reports. By building apps using the Workiom API, you can create custom integrations with any product on the cloud.

Plus, you can create custom views in the form of Kanban boards about each task and project. These come in handy for reporting to clients and drawing widespread productivity reports. For public-facing teams, you can create public forms to import customer data right into the app. 

All in all, the app lets you monitor remote teams from the app interface anytime, anywhere. 

Ready to Manage Your Remote Teams Efficiently with Workiom?

Remote working has many benefits, cost-saving being on the top. However, to make it work for your organization, you need an efficient task management software solution like Workiom. It eases team communication, enhances collaboration, and improves employee accountability. 

On top of that, Workiom keeps your sensitive business data safe, secure, and up-to-date. The native integrations save you precious hours when working with multiple apps on the cloud.

Do you need help creating a business template for your company using Workiom? Get in touch with our sales team for a no-obligation quote and free demo today.

‍