10 Ways to Improve Accountability on Your Remote Team

Accountability motivates employees because they're aware of their actions. Here are some ways to improve accountability in your remote team.

Remote work managers struggle to maintain accountability among their teams because they are out of sight, working from various remote locations. Your team members may be out of the office, but you can keep a tab on their performance by cultivating a culture of accountability.

Thanks to technology, your remote workforce is just a button away. It's a question of making your interactions meaningful. Check out these practical ways to improve accountability on your remote team.

1. Delegate Tasks

Delegating tasks is crucial for work progress in a remote team. You want your team members to be productive from their various remote locations. As a leader, you must learn to delegate tasks at different stages of a project. Otherwise, work will pile up on your task, stalling the workflow.

Besides showing that you trust your team's judgment, delegating tasks also shows that you are flexible and willing to give your workers a chance to work independently, especially when they work remotely.

Monday.com is a good workflow application that you can use to delegate responsibilities among members of a remote team. It allows you to generate assignments and track projects through its own proprietary board system. Additionally, it offers the option to import data from external sources.

2. Outline Your Expectations

Outlining expectations is one of the most overlooked strategies for enhancing productivity in a remote work environment. Some team members may not be on-site as their colleagues, but this should not be an excuse to stall tasks assigned to them.

You need a consistent workflow tool that can successfully transmit all your requests to team members, regardless of their locations. Cloud-based systems like Kissflow and Nintex allow you to outline job descriptions, so team members understand the expectations. You can also optimize, automate, and design your projects with these tools easily.

3. Track Work Progress

Tracking the work progress of your remote staff is a path to embracing accountability. Without tracking tasks assigned to teams, you can get overwhelmed with dire consequences on a decrease in performance, productivity, loss of task details, and valuable time on the job.

Tracking work progress enables you to build automated workflows for your teams. By doing this, you can further help your workers be more productive while managing chunks of project tasks at the same time. So, you are just one click away from sending a task with its details to a teammate. Some tools that can help with tracking work progress are ClickUp and Todoist.

4. Have Regular Meetings

With the ever-increasing dominance of technology in every industry and the rapid pace at which the workplace is developing, regular engagement among staff is essential. Interestingly, team members don't have to confine themselves to a physical space to interact with each other. They can do that remotely in a virtual space.

Engaging your remote teams in meetings gives you a sense of their work progress. Everyone gets a chance to share what they are working on and how it's coming along. As a leader, instead of being in the dark about your team's work progress, you get an update on what they are doing.

You can spot when they are off track or doing the wrong things early enough before it gets out of hand. Some communication tools that can help with regular meetings in your remote workplace are Microsoft Teams and Zoom.

5. Create Opportunities for Collaboration

Collaboration helps cultivate team spirit and efficiency among working teams. When employees are free to communicate and contribute to projects, they have a better sense of belonging.

You can encourage active participation and help your remote team feel connected through collaborative tasks that allow individual contributions. Additionally, you can level out opportunities among your teammates irrespective of rank, status, or experience using systems such as Slack and Google Docs for remote work collaboration.

6. Evaluate Performance

Performance evaluation is key for team growth and development. It helps improve the performance of an organization at both an individual and corporate level.

Implementing effective tips for team performance measurement creates a dedicated workforce—one that's not only skilled in project execution, but also efficient in carrying out its delegated duties.

If you don't have a standard performance management evaluation system, you may fail to target employees that need motivation. Some examples of work evaluation tools that you can use are Energage and Impraise.

7. Share Results Openly

If you want to run a thriving workplace, you need to make sure everyone can talk to each other openly. As a leader, it's important to give people the power to make decisions by showing them how their work fits into the bigger picture. This will help them understand the decision-making progress and how those decisions affect them and the company as a whole.

Sharing your team members' performance results openly helps them know each other's roles and how they fit into the general workflow. Doing this will ensure that everyone is on the same page and moving toward the same goal. Cloud-based solutions such as Microsoft Teams and Slack can encourage the sharing of results in the workplace.

8. Create an Online Dashboard for KPIs

In this digital age, leaders must embrace accountability tools to quickly adapt to the changing business world. A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard is just one of many such tools that can help you and your team communicate while also accessing and assessing work performances.

Online dashboards for KPIs are high-level signals that indicate how a project is progressing towards the company's established objectives. Thus, KPIs are essential elements of added value to a company. Your staff does not need to be physically present to be assessed, as the case may be.

The following KPI dashboards, Datapine and Scoro, can help you simplify complex data sets. They can also help you keep your business strategy on track by tracking finances, work input and output by staff, planning projects, and compiling results on the go.

9. Follow Up on Tasks

After assigning tasks to your remote workers, follow up with them to learn from their workplace situations. If you've provided them with all the information they require, ask them whether they are comfortable executing the tasks.

If you have set goals and milestones for them, ask about the feasibility of achieving them. Acknowledge team members publicly when they do a great job to show your appreciation. Recognition of hard work through comments and bonuses enhances staff morale and boosts their productivity.

After completion of the delegated tasks and projects, you can arrange for a follow-up on activities using collaboration tools like Zoom and Gmail. There, you can mention the individuals on the team who successfully executed the specified assignments and helped your organization attain targets.

10. Give Constructive Feedback

A successful project includes giving constructive feedback. Don't overlook the contribution of team members that made such a task successful.

Avoid micromanaging your team in the name of constructive feedback. Not everyone on the team will produce the same work output, but those that perform on a consistent level should be recognized. A task manager tool like nTask or ClickUp can help you and your team track the progress of delegated tasks for feedback.

Leveraging Workflow Strategies for Remote Work Accountability

A successful project involves everyone on the team. You can help your workers increase their productivity and improve their skills by making them more accountable for their actions and in-actions.

The strategies discussed above go a long way in helping you create a strong and efficient remote workforce. Your team will also get the push they need to deliver their best results in their roles and responsibilities.