Over the last year, working from home has been the norm than the exception. Even as many of us are preparing to get back to the office, a large number of people would still be working remotely for the foreseeable future. This means managing a distributed team is something that you would need to stay on top of for some time more.

As many have learned hands-on by now, the challenges of managing a distributed team are different from managing a team in person. The good news is there are efficient ways to tackle these challenges.

Tracking the project’s progress in real-time

Imagine that the deadline for a project is looming up, and a stakeholder asks you for a status report.

While working from the office, you can just call up the team leads or team members to get the relevant info. But in a distributed work environment it’s never a given you would get hold of someone immediately. You may pass a message or even call a team member, only to have them get back sometime later. But it’s hardly professional to keep the stakeholder on hold.

Tracking made easy

I’m Productive is the right tool for such contingencies. For it gives you live tracking of tasks; you can just tap open the application and see the progress bar in real-time. This report is not based on any arbitrary value either. You can get a detailed view of the metrics- like the number of hours already spent on the project, the expected time to finish etc.

Non-intrusive tracking

This is made possible using the check-in-break-check-out feature.

The idea behind this is pretty simple. Once an employee logs in, the system’s intelligent timer would start on its own. It’s automatically paused when they either take a break or check out. And at the next check-in, it resumes without external intervention.

This means, with minimal supervision, you get all the information you need about task progress.

But that’s not to say I’m Productive breaches into an employee’s privacy. It’s a system that respects the same. Unlike many other tools of its ilk, it doesn’t capture keystrokes or screenshots of works in progress. It uses a transition tracking approach which gives you the precise time spent on a task without micro-managing and demeaning individual morale.

 Figuring out who is performing well and not

When your team members are working on different tasks across geographies, pinpointing the reason for a delay could be hard. You may have to get status reports from multiple teams leads before discovering the delay-causing silo.

I’m Productive provides you with accurate productivity reports for each employee. Among other details, you will find in the report is the time each team member is taking to finish a task. Extraneous data like the break-time that an employee takes is not factored in, so the data you get is as accurate as possible.

Once you have the measure of time each employee spends on a task, it’s easy to find where the delay is happening. After that, you can help the employee with the necessary help to finish the task at the earliest.

Designed to achieve predictable revenue

Both these aspects- tracking progress and locating bottlenecks- are designed to help gain predictable project delivery. The timely completion of projects also leads to a predictable revenue outlook for your company.

Getting back to the normal of working alongside your colleagues in the office may be invigorating. But for many of us, that day is still a bit away.

But in the meantime, managing distributed teams should be a smooth process, with I’m Productive. What’s mentioned here are relevant pain points and their solutions. In the coming posts, we would discuss even more ways in which I’m Productive would help make managing distributed teams easier.

Stay tuned, stay productive.