If your team is using multiple methods to manage job progress (spreadsheets, cloud storage, email and paper documents), this information can become hard to track down or it could get lost as people move between systems.

As a starting point, your team should be able to easily access:

• Which jobs and tasks they’ve been assigned
• How much time should be allocated to each job
• Start date and end dates, and major milestones for all jobs they’re working on
• How to track time and costs and allocate them to the appropriate job
• Upcoming, in progress, on hold, or cancelled jobs
• A job management system (like WorkflowMax) that lets you manage your entire job cycle in one place and gives you a single point of truth for all job-related data.

Being diligent about recording time and costs is a team effort. Right now is a great time to re-establish timesheet and cost tracking best practices.

Here are some things you could put in place:

• Set expectations regarding when employees should be filling out timesheets (as work is completed, on a daily basis, etc)
• A cut-off time for timesheet submission (do employees need to submit more often?)
• The level of detail required in a timesheet (do time logs need to be more descriptive?)
• Job-specific requirements (like cost centre allocations)
• Keeping track of unbillable hours and costs so you can manage resource planning and overhead expenses

To help motivate everyone to do their part, make it as easy as possible for your team to track and submit job time and costs. Job management and time tracking software offer different ways to track employee time (including desktop and mobile apps, daily and weekly timesheets and built-in timers to record time as work is in progress) and then automatically allocate that time to the appropriate job.

When you can’t see your team sitting across from you, it can be easy to lose a line of sight into what everyone is working on and assess your team’s capacity to take on work.

Here’s what you can do to keep the balance:

• Develop a process for monitoring your team’s capacity
• Make adjustments to current, recurring and future jobs more frequently
• Use a job management solution or scheduling app to get better visibility

While it’s clearly important to monitor your team’s completion of individual tasks, when your team is physically dispersed it’s critical to establish and track against job milestones.

Common examples of job milestones include:

• Start and end dates
• Budget checks
• Draft due dates
• External or internal reviews
• Tests or inspections
• Setting milestones

Accurate reporting gives you insights into productivity, performance, workflow and profitability that can inform business decisions.

Customising a set of reports can help you answer questions like:

• Are our current jobs on budget?
• Are employees completing work as efficiently?
• Which employees are the most productive?
• Who might need some extra support or training?
• Which jobs are the most profitable?
• Are any jobs more work than they’re worth?
• How do our estimated hours compare to our actuals?
• Are we on track with what we quoted?
• How much money have we generated?

When you can no longer rely on morning coffee banter and the lunch table to connect with your colleagues, it can make it hard to feel like you’re part of a team!

Try some of these strategies:

• Implement 15-minute team syncs every morning to catch up. Encourage everyone to have their cameras on so you can pick up on non-verbal cues like body language, tone of voice and appearance to get a sense of how everyone is feelingStart every scheduled meeting with 5-10 minutes of small talk before you get into the topic at hand
• Host an optional remote happy hour or team activity at the end of each week. Play virtual games, do trivia, start a book club, or anything else that helps keep your team connected

Formally scheduling time to not talk about work may seem counterproductive to staying on top of jobs, but informal social time often forms the glue that keeps your team working together cohesively.

Working on your own, especially when you’re used to an office working environment, can pose serious challenges to one’s mental and physical health. According to a recent report, remote employees are more susceptible to working longer hours and feeling ‘always on’ due to blurred boundaries between work and personal life.

To keep your team feeling happy and healthy (and therefore empowered to stay on top of their work), consider the following tips:

• Promote flexible working times to accommodate different household schedules
• Encourage regular breaks! Research shows that short breaks have many benefits for employee wellbeing, including improved productivity, better sleep and reduced stress
• Organise wellbeing activities for your team like yoga, meditation and sharing healthy recipes
• Do one of Xero’s wellbeing courses to help with work/life balance, stress and resilience.

  This content is an excerpt from a recent blog post by Paige Sopik. Read the full version here.