How to manage and track team productivity while working remotely

In 2020, working from home has become the new norm in many industries. Thousands of companies across the world are embracing a ‘remote work’ culture.

The positives and negatives of remote work are constantly being debated in executive meetings, lunchrooms, and coffee shops, however, the data shows that working remotely is growing in popularity at a substantial rate.

Some studies even show that working from home can make you happier!

The best remote teams have a good strategy and the right tools. They exhibit stellar communication skills, support each other, and hold each other accountable. And most important, they keep their eyes on the numbers and track their performance.

Implementing an effective working from home strategy

When a company makes the decision to support employees who want to work remotely or establish entire remote teams, it’s important they leverage software tools that make communication, collaboration, and transparency a breeze.

Here are some of the tools we use at Klipfolio to manage our remote teams:

• Slack for team collaboration and instant messaging.
• Zoom for video conference calls with team members and customers.
• Google Suite for email, document collaboration, file storage, shared calendar, and more.
• Mural for team brainstorming workflow collaboration.
• Trello for project planning.

Another great 'work from home' tool worth checking out is ProofHub.

Daily scrums and regularly scheduled one-on-one meetings are ideal for keeping teammates in the loop and providing each other with regular support.

Meeting regularly using a video conference tool is also good for forming and maintaining personal bonds between colleagues. For example, Klipfolio’s remote marketing team meets every morning at 9:45 AM to discuss our daily priorities, how we can support each other, and any other breaking company news that may have surfaced.

Every member of our remote marketing team trusts each other, holds each other accountable, and measures performance by tieing activities and deliverables to revenue using data.

Let’s dive into the most effective ways your company can measure remote team performance.

Metrics to measure productivity remotely

Before we explore how you should track and measure team performance, let’s start with what you need to be measuring.

Choosing the most impactful metrics is key and it’s important to avoid metric overload.

It’s recommended that you don’t exceed 10 metrics per team when measuring work from home performance. Less is more!

To get your team up and running quickly with their performance metrics, here are the top 5 Work From Home (WFH) performance metrics for sales, marketing, support, and HR teams.

Top 5 WFH Sales Performance Metrics:

1. Call Volume
2. Sales Per Rep
3. Revenue Per Sales Rep
4. Lead to Win Conversion Rate
5. Average Selling Price

Top 5 WFH Marketing Performance Metrics:

1. Website Sessions
2. New Marketing Qualified Leads
3. Lead Conversion Rate
4. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
5. Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI)

Top 5 WFH Support Performance Metrics:

1. Call Volume
2. Average Speed to Answer
3. First Response Time
4. Customer Issues
5. Customer Service Satisfaction

Top 5 WFH HR Performance Metrics:

1. Profit Per Employee
2. Revenue Per Employee
3. Expenses Per Employee
4. Payroll To Revenue Ratio
5. Employee Turnover Rate

Using dashboards to track team productivity

Your best bet for remote team monitoring is to use a productivity tracking software tool that will display your metrics in real-time and is easy to share with your teammates and company leaders.

Klipfolio is rated the top dashboard on earth and offers a 14-day free trial so you can give it a spin worry-free after getting up and running in minutes.

Companies that typically build dashboards and succeed with data are ones that appoint a ‘Builder’ to prepare, manage, and maintain the company metrics. Alternatively, you can appoint the team lead to be the Builder or have another person on the team champion the role.

If your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to build, but you have budget, you can simply pay someone to do the work and maintenance for you!

And finally, you’ll want to choose a dashboard solution that allows you to view your team metrics on a mobile device and have dashboard reports emailed to anyone in PDF format.

Happy dashboarding!