Working from home, working flexible hours or working from a different part of the world; flexible working gives greater freedom. These flexible freedoms have been with us for many years, but have rocketed in popularity through necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Flexible working also brings with it some challenges. The biggest challenge of working where you are not so visible to the office, is letting people know what you’re up to. Too little individual project progress is shared within the office, outside of a desk chat or meeting. Working remotely or at a different time of day to your colleagues has highlighted the importance of sharing this information. Communicating progress can be stressful and frustrating for workers and managers alike.
The majority of businesses are adjusting their ways of working, to have flexibly working in their core. Remote, flexible or asynchronous production needs systems to keep track of it. Businesses are turning to task management facilities such as PlanHive to automatically keep project teams in sync .
Whether you have systems in place yet or not, here are our tips to make flexible working easier for the whole team:
- Regularly set your current work items across your team
- Share what you are currently progressing, completing or are stuck on.
- Set the communication channel for issues and progress
- Agree on review points
- Always set an agenda and communicate the outcomes of any progress meetings
- Use a system such as PlanHive to automatically communicate your progress any time you update your task lists