Office Automation For Remote Team

Offering employees remote work is a great way to make your organization future-oriented and attract a growing number of candidates who now prefer jobs that allow them to work remotely.

However, remote work also has its own challenges, some of which require a robust remote work strategy to address, while others can be easily handled with the help of automation. Here is a list of common challenges remote teams face:

Cooperation

Remote teams often struggle to collaborate because they cannot meet face-to-face, especially without the right tools. But at the same time, too many collaboration tools lacking seamless integration or automation can easily trap remote workers in silos, making remote collaboration more difficult.

When you are remote, it becomes more difficult to track how remote employees are doing on your team and whether they are submitting all their work on time. Additionally, tracking project progress and ensuring transparency across the team was a huge challenge.

Team management

Managing a remote team is very different from managing an in-office team. You cannot just work in an office to check on employees and see how they handle work. With remote teams, you need to be more conscious of scheduling meetings and organizing one-on-one discussions to bring everyone together as a team.

Employee morale

It is easy for remote employees to start feeling isolated from their teams while working from home, which invariably leads to a drop in employee morale and engagement. Remote teams require different strategies to build transparency, rapport, and trust among team members.

One of the best ways to overcome the above challenges and provide your employees with a more streamlined work experience is to introduce automation.

By using  OA to automate your workflow and business processes, you can improve productivity, efficiency and employee experience. When your remote teams are no longer bogged down by time-consuming manual processes, they can use their limited time to handle more complex job responsibilities.

Standardizing all processes and converting them into streamlined workflows in  OA ensure that employees can keep track of everything that happens within the team. You can also create templates for different processes and automatically copy them every time you want to create a new process to save time. Seamless tracking also enables very fast review and approval within remote teams.

Increased productivity

According to one study, the productivity of remote teams is directly related to the nature of the tasks they handle. Boring tasks can have a fairly negative impact on productivity, while creative and brainstorming tasks can have a positive influence on overall productivity.

When you use  OA to manage all the boring and repetitive tasks that follow predictable patterns, your remote team has the opportunity to deal with more challenging and creative tasks. In fact, 69% of employees say automation reduces time wasted on work hours, and 59% say they can get 6 more hours per week when repetitive parts of their jobs are automated.

Better collaboration

OA not only frees up time for employees to collaborate with team members, but also further simplifies communication and collaboration in remote teams.

After all, if you cannot communicate effectively with your team members, you cannot collaborate effectively. While some important communication issues are best left to us humans, such as providing feedback or context for decision-making,  OA can easily handle other tasks, like updating team members on tasks you have completed.

To do this, you can turn any team communication channel into a command center to receive notifications of all project-related activities or completed tasks. You can also centralize all notifications to check what team members have been doing.

Improved transparency

By streamlining and transforming processes into workflows with  OA you can make them easily accessible to your employees, thereby increasing the transparency of your remote teams. Greater transparency can also lead to more accountability in remote teams.

Managers can be automatically notified whenever team members submit their work, which reduces any miscommunication and ensures everyone is on the same page. Likewise, team members can be automatically notified of delays if tasks are not completed even after a specified deadline, without the need for managers to tell them there is a pending task.

Increased satisfaction and engagement

OA makes it easier to assign tasks and set deadlines. Employees can reassign tasks based on their skills, increasing employee satisfaction and engagement.

Moving to higher value-added jobs

It is important to note that  OA is not meant to replace people in an organization. Rather, it is about giving employees more time and energy to focus on the more fun and creative parts of their jobs. For remote teams, automation helps increase productivity, efficiency, and collaboration.

For companies that are expanding their remote workforce, the introduction of  OA is now a must to maintain efficiency. By handling trivial and repetitive tasks, the system is able to provide employees with a more comprehensive digital experience.