Over the past few years, the popularity of hiring remote teams has been growing rapidly. However, many employers were skeptical, and considered remote workers as less valuable.
Fast forward to 2020, with COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, and remote work is now essential. Telework is a growing trend, managers are more receptive to the idea, and remote work policies have been adopted by many companies.
According to Global Workplace Analytics, 56% of the U.S. workforce holds a position that could be easily transferred to telework. Nevertheless, we are still in the early stages, and there is a lot of learning to do. For example, how do you measure the performance of remote teams in order to ensure their success?
In this article, we will examine three approaches that HR managers can use to optimize the performance of remote workers.
1. Concentrate Performance Reviews on Work Quality
Any HR manager would agree that evaluating a remote team is a challenge. Since you don’t have day-to-day access to workers, it’s hard to make an honest assessment of their motivation and performance.
However, you can effectively keep track of both of these factors by focusing on work quality.
Quality of work assessment is a type of employee performance review that focuses on how employees have discharged their responsibilities and how much work has been produced.
You should focus on the quality of work with remote teams because the nature of telework doesn’t allow you to interact with a remote team in the way you would do in the office. Moreover, you need to take into account that remote workers may have different schedules and work environments.
Acceleration Partners, a company that helps clients develop customer acquisition programs, uses quality-based assessments to evaluate its remote workers, and measures success by the results delivered to clients. According to Acceleration Partners, the quality of work done is more important than quantity. If they notice a drop in quality, it is a signal that immediate action is required to improve employee motivation.
2. Evaluate Remote Workers Using Performance Data
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many companies have started using remote work management tools to assess employee performance. As things return slowly to normal, companies will be reluctant to give up these tools because of the valuable metrics they deliver.
Apart from work quality, performance metrics are another way for HR managers to evaluate remote teams objectively, allowing HR managers to:
- Evaluate each worker individually
- Calculate a ‘trust index’ to measure the remote’s team motivation
- Obtain evidence-based feedback regarding the team’s performance
Flex Jobs, a job service for remote job listings, has been metrics-oriented since the beginning. The company identifies key metrics for every employee, which they consistently track. Then, every quarter, they discuss these metrics with their remote teams to make sure that employees and HR are on the same page regarding performance.
When it comes to tracking metrics, it is important to make sure that each remote team is aware of its numbers. You can do this by writing a weekly or monthly report, which can be prepared by HR or outsourced to a professional writing services that has HR experience. In preparing these reports, keep in mind that it’s important to maintain consistency so that remote workers can easily digest the information.
3. Use an R&R System to Celebrate Success
A Reward and Recognition system is another tool that can help you track your remote team’s KPIs. Paying attention to employee development and rewarding success is a great way to keep motivation high.
Reward and Recognition systems work just as well for remote teams as they do for in-office teams. They allow HR to focus on results achieved, and so track the performance of a remote team objectively.
American Express is one of the companies that takes advantage of an R&R system to track the KPIs of remote teams. The company recognizes its employees, rewarding them for successful customer service. Apart from that, the company uses its R&R system to celebrate each significant success of its remote employees, from completing a data science course to introducing innovative business ideas that increase the company’s revenue or bring in new customers.
Rewards for your remote employees should not necessarily be financial. For smaller achievements, you could offer an Amazon Gift Card. Small rewards signal that you are paying attention and that you care, and so should still have an impact on your remote team’s performance and motivation.
Wrapping Up
Even though the remote work trend has been around for a while, we’re still learning how to make it work. The process of optimizing remote work will be different for every company, and there is not just one correct route to get you there.
However, what is true for every company is that remote work KPIs should be assessed, and assessed objectively.
In this article, we introduced three ways to successfully evaluate the performance of a remote team. Hopefully these insights will help you to better understand which approach will work for your team and to keep their performance and motivation levels high.
Helene Cue is a professional writer and editor. She is an online essay writer and also writes a blog where she shares innovative remote work management ideas.
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