How to Reduce The Possibility Of Human Error In Remote Teams

If you run a business, human error can be a significant source of problems. From technical to customer service to financial issues, one mistake can be costly. That’s why it’s important to have tactics and strategies to minimize human error.

While you can never get rid of it completely, there are things you can do to dramatically reduce mistakes and avoid pitfalls in remote teams. To help you keep your business running smoothly, here are seven things to put into action:

Transparent Communication

When your remote team is not communicating clearly, it can lead to a number of problems. Someone might forget to include an essential feature in a product that you are releasing. Or perhaps a customer service agent is unaware of an important issue that a customer is facing because they never received the information from another team member.

When communication is obscure and slow, it creates room for all kinds of human error. Ensure that open, transparent communication is part of your organizational DNA.

Encourage employees to talk often with one another. Using online chat software such as Slack or Trello is one way to manage projects and keep everyone in the loop.

This way, you always have a running list of what needs to be done. People can make comments or inform managers of delays, needs, and problems.

Remote teams don’t have the benefit of simply turning to a colleague for a quick chat or exchange thoughts as they would in a traditional office. However, with a culture of open communication, fewer things will fall through the cracks.

Create a Clear Policy

Within every remote team, there should be clear guidelines and policies. As a project manager, it’s important to layout precisely what your expectations are with clear goals. This gives your team precise rules and expectations that they can follow.

If you’re not around to delegate and assign tasks, your employees might meander between jobs, meddle into each other’s work, or spend too much time on less relevant tasks. You need to provide a structure to their day and goals that ensure projects are completed on time.

Your best bet is to task specific people with completing specific parts of the project. By assigning this responsibility, you reduce the chance of poor work performance and errors.

Streamline Decision Making

The last thing you want is decision bottlenecks in the organization. You need to simplify the decision-making process as much as possible. Check-in with your team as regularly as needed, but avoid needing to sign off on every decision.

People can work faster when they are given more freedom. With remote teams, you won’t be able to peer over their shoulder every minute. It’s best to create guidelines about what kind of decisions and actions can be performed without supervision or permission.

For instance, in the case of customer service, consider allowing a daily dollar figure that can be spent to provide refunds or gifts to customers. Or, for your sales team, allow a certain discount to be applied to the final purchase price of an item.

This still sets boundaries, but it means that managers can focus on the higher-level aspects of growing the business.

Email Marketing Automation

There are a lot of mistakes that can happen when sending emails. And yet, your email list can be one of the most important and profitable parts of your business. You can run promotions, solve customer problems, and build brand loyalty with the right approach.

Automation is present in every business niche, and a backbone of the fourth industrial revolution. Actually, industry 4.0 presents data automation and automating processes through technology-driven devices and software.

Typos, sending emails to the wrong customers, omitting attachments and other human errors can be detrimental to your bottom line. One way to mitigate this is by automating your email marketing.

Utilizing an email finder tool (visit https://rocketreach.co/ for more info) can enable you to collect valid email addresses, allowing you to create a list of high-quality leads. It goes without saying that using an email finder tool instead of manually searching for emails saves you a lot of time and produces excellent results. With automation-focused tools, you can ensure that your emails go out at the right time to the right people on your list. Also, you can automate common answers to customer service issues to save time.

Backup Your Data

Your company’s data is worth its weight in gold. In today’s world, you can maximize your data by applying algorithms and software to glean new insights.

Not only do you benefit from using your data correctly, but you can lose a lot by having your data lost or hacked.

However, one simple phishing scam can effectively bring your business down. In remote teams, the chances of IT-related disasters are even higher if employees are using their own devices or connecting to unsecured networks.

Your data is not only at risk from external attacks, but internal errors as well. A misclick can cause significant and irreparable damage to data sets.

In addition, conduct corporate training for your people to properly use their systems, you also need to backup your data frequently to minimize damage from accidental deletions caused by human error.

By planning ahead, you can minimize the effects of a downtime and be able to pick up right where you left off instead of spending days or weeks trying to fix a problem that could have been prevented in the first place.

Use a CRM

Your remote team needs to be able to keep up with all of the information you have about your customers. There are different stages of the buying journey, and they all require different information.

You need to know how far along a customer is to understand how to communicate with them. If they are at the top of the funnel, then perhaps they need to receive more promotional material that explains the benefit of our product.

On the other hand, repeat customers might receive exclusive deals or follow-up calls from an account manager.

Leaving your customer relationship management to chance allows too much room for error. By having a dedicated CRM, your team can share information and have a file on each customer so that crucial info doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

Conduct Reviews

Eliminating all errors is impossible. But one way to make the rest of these tips more effective is to conduct regular reviews. Have a manager look over team performance and point out places where they can improve. Little by little, preventable problems will start to disappear.

Conclusion

Getting your remote team to a point where they are making significantly fewer mistakes is a crucial part of success. With so much distance between your team, you need smart ways to make sure they stay on track and avoid common errors.

Luckily, with the tips above, you can start implementing actions to reduce human error right away. Once these policies and procedures are in place, you’ll find that your team gets more done without needing to stop or spend money to fix preventable problems.

And all this extra productivity will filter down to your bottom line for bigger profits long term.