In today’s hyperconnected world, everyone seems to be “busy” all the time. However, there is a distinction between being busy and being productive. It is critical to help facilitate true productivity on your team, but that facilitation can be a challenge for the modern leader, especially if you have one or more remote project managers on your team. Here are some strategies you can use to help boost productivity today.
Provide Clear Direction
Never assume anyone on your team, whether they are in the office or working remotely as project managers, understands your priorities. If you want people to prioritize tasks in a certain order, you must provide clear directives. When delegating and assigning work, make sure to provide a deadline and a priority level for the project.
Finally, always check in with employees to see if they need anything from you or from the company to help them achieve their goals. People don’t always feel comfortable speaking up, so it is important to ask so that you can provide clear direction.
Minimize Distractions
In order to be productive, and not just “busy” your employees need to be able to set distractions aside and prioritize tasks that will help each of them meet their individual goals. To help your team limit distractions, make sure your policies on social media and cell phone use while working are clear. Beyond this, make your team responsible for daily goals and create accountability checks to ensure goals are met and potentially productive time isn’t wasted.
Focus on Results
When you’ve got remote project managers on your team, it’s easy to get stressed out about where they are and what they are doing throughout the day. This worry can cause people to become micromanagers of their remote contributors but micromanaging takes time away from your own strategic tasks as well as the project managers’ strategic tasks.
It is important to trust your project managers. You contracted them for a project because of their history of success, so let them be free to do their jobs. If you can’t get a hold of them on email for twenty minutes, don’t assume they are slacking off and spend the next 45 minutes trying to figure out what they are up to. Instead of worrying about their schedule, stay focused on the results they are generating. If they are exceeding expectations, give them the freedom to keep doing what they are doing.
Managing productive teams isn’t always easy. For more tips or to learn how you can connect with productive and effective project managers for your agriculture business, contact the expert recruiters at Magnify Resources today.