There is an increasing ideology for the work from home movement. There are many benefits for employees to be able to work remotely, but with those benefits comes some difficulties. From a managing standpoint, here are some tips to help you manage your team to ensure they are effective:

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1. Regular check-ins and meetings.

To effectively manage your team and employees when they are working from home, maintain check-ins and have regular meetings. This will allow you to communicate with your team to ensure that you are familiar with what they are doing, communicate any goals and targets that you have as a business or company and any changes that need to be made to certain projects, stay up to date with work as a whole and establish communication with your employees in a positive and cohesive work environment.

Build comradery in your business by ensuring that everyone is comfortable communicating with you and with each other. Regular check-ins will help you maintain the productivity of your employees. As the boss, you should take the initiative to communicate with your employees. You cannot expect them to know when to check in with you. Instead, create and stipulate the expectations you have.

To further facilitate communication especially between peers, create a network or platform for them to use. If you do not want to build your own, there are plenty of platforms available to download and share within your working environments.

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2. Use productivity tracking software.

Aside from the practices you implement with your staff, another way to ensure that your team is as productive as possible is the use of different tracking software. Using software for working from home connects to servers that communicate with each other and allow you to maintain order with your employees.

This type of software keeps a record and data of the work that your employees are accomplishing throughout the day. Through this, you can monitor the progress in real-time. 

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3. Don't track and view employees' information without their consent.

When you are using tracking software to monitor your employees' work, do not use it to breach their privacy. If you are going to view screens and closely monitor what your staff is doing on their computer, you have to let them know.

The software you use to monitor their work can simply be used to highlight work milestones and targets achieved and does not need to breach privacy . You want to develop a sense of trust within your work environment as your employees' morale can easily change and deteriorate if you are trying to actively micromanage their work.

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4. Don't judge your employees by their environment.

Often, when it comes to managing your employees, one of the biggest problems bosses and managers run into is their need to maintain control and over manage their team. When it comes to working from home options, not everyone has the same options in terms of space they are provided. Their home lives may all vary significantly.

As long as your employees are achieving their goals and targets and keeping up with work, it should not matter what their home setup looks like. You should not judge others by their situations as long as they are making it work. As a boss or manager, you should ensure that you are not allowing others to make those judgments to facilitate an inclusive working environment.

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5. Don't push employees to overwork.

Working from home provides many benefits. Communication through different platforms and programs is made easy. Employers can easily get in contact with your employees in case of work emergencies and sudden changes that need to be made. This may translate to your employees working extra hours to correct matters but you do not want to make this a regular habit. Employees can burn out, holding negative emotions to the job if your expectations are too high.

Just because you can easily reach your employees around the clock does not mean you should take advantage of that. Encourage your employees to have a balance of personal life and work. Given ample rest and time off, your employees will come to work with more energy and be more productive with their time on the clock. 

As companies make a transition to allow for more work from home capabilities, adjustments should be made in their practices and mindsets. Understanding the different difficulties and flexibility and how they work in conjunction with each other can help make your business with your work-from-home employees function just as efficiently.

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