What are the Pros and Cons of Working Remotely?

[Jorge Abreu]

What are your thoughts are about personally working remotely?

Also, if you are a business owner how you feel about your team working remotely?

In order for remote work to be successful in any company, the business owner needs to ensure that each person knows exactly what they need to be doing every day. The book The Four Disciplines of Execution by Franklin Covey is a good resource for business management strategy and to help managers create actual work plans.

Discipline 1: Focus on The Wildly Important

Exceptional execution starts with narrowing the focus— clearly identifying what must be done, or nothing else you achieve really matters much.

Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures

Twenty percent of activities produce eighty percent of results. The highest predictors of goal achievement are the 80/20 activities that are identified and codified into individual actions and tracked fanatically.

Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

People and teams play differently when they are keeping score, and the right kind of scoreboards motivate the players to win.

Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability

Each team engages in a simple weekly process that highlights successes, analyzes failures, and course-corrects as necessary, creating the ultimate performance-management system.

One of the keys to a successful remote work structure is excellent communication. Our Elevate team has recently implemented a system in order to communicate better. We start the day with a beginning of the day email to the entire team. In the email, we list our personal priorities for the day so that the entire team knows what we are currently working on that will move the needle for the business. At the end of the day, we send a follow-up email to the team where we score our productivity for the day on a scale of 1-10 and list the tasks completed. This is a great accountability tool and has worked well for our team. We also have a weekly virtual team meeting using Google Hangouts where we update the team on all current deals, new leads, equity raise, etc. We also discuss any struggles we are having and celebrate the successes of the team. Finally, we make sure that once a year, we spend however many days together that are necessary to plan the new year’s goals and make any changes to the systems and processes we are currently using.

Below is a Remote Work Toolbox that can help manage your team:

File storage

- Gsuite

Project management

- Tello

- Slack

- Asana

- Teamwork

File sharing

- Gsuite

Password Protection

- One Password

- Last Pass

Video Communication

- Zoom

- Webinar Jam

- Google Meet

Group Chat

- Slack

- Google Hangouts

Time Tracking

- Teamwork

- Time doctor

CRM

- Active Campaign

- Zoho- Pipedrive

Screen Capture

- Snag It

- Awesome Screenshot

- Loom