Maximize Remote Productivity With This Simple Tool

In the office, if a colleague fails to deliver as promised, following up could hardly be easier: just go knock on their door. With remote work this is a taller task. You could send a message or email, but you might not get a response for days. So, what to do?

After years of dealing with exactly these situations managing remote teams, we developed a simple, intuitive method we call Days of the Week©, or DOTW for short.

DOTW involves a regular weekly cadence of daily activities to keep remote project teams on track to deliver the best results with minimal stress. It organizes team members’ steps to make sure everything gets done. If anything is unclear, DOTW ensures follow up. If something isn’t getting done, it’s flagged as a risk and addressed or escalated as needed.

DOTW is a key part of Virtira’s remote project management (RPM) framework to boost productivity. RPM guides projects from start to finish while emphasizing direct communication, quick wins and executive buy-in and engagement. RPM combines lessons learned over decades of working in remote with elements of Agile, traditional project management, and change management.

Within this framework, DOTW ensures the delivery of optimal results by laying out what to do, who will do it and when it will be done. when to do it. At heart, it’s all about following up, early and often, to ensure easily distracted remote workers keep their eyes on the ball.

It all starts with the weekly cadence. We do this on all our projects, whether internal or for the most important clients. We’ve found this works for us, but a different cadence may work better for you and your business.

• Monday: Send reminders (via email, calendar reminder, or direct message) to all team members highlighting their current task, or action item, and deadline. Update the project and action logs with any new info; If new risks emerge, relay to manager.
• Tuesday and Wed: Status meetings with the core team to discuss progress, identify decisions and take next steps. Discuss laggard areas and ways to expedite and address and escalate risks as needed. Take detailed meeting minutes using an action-oriented template and distribute.
• Thursday: Status Reporting. Send out the latest status report to the team and all stakeholders, updated with new information gained from previous days’ meetings. Highlight serious risks in bold or ALL CAPS to underscore urgency. Identifying and communicating risk within status reports is critical to project success. Failure to acknowledge even minor risk is the surest route to project failure. Resist the temptation.
• Friday: We call it Follow-Up Friday because this is the day we again send out reminders on action items, but this time to everybody involved in the project, internally and externally. This gives all stakeholders a takeaway, something to keep in mind over the weekend, and identifies for everyone what’s not getting done.

Sounds simple, right? That’s the idea. With remote, it’s all about simplicity. The easier you can make it, the better. Because somewhere the dog’s barking, the baby’s crying, there’s a knock at the door, another fire to put out, and you’ve got a personal call to deal with, so a message that’s quickly lodged in the brain is the best way to keep everyone focused.

Your team, and everybody else, will quickly learn that if they fail to complete their deliverable highlighted on Monday, they’ll be called out on it on Friday for all to see. They’ll also experience the flush of pride that occurs when a series of action items that appeared on the Monday reminders were nowhere to be found by Friday.

This simple focus on what’s been done, what’s yet to be done, and existing risks helps organize workflow, so the best people are always working on the right tasks. Often, the end result is optimal productivity and the earliest possible project completion.

We have implemented these insights and strategies over the past decade in more than 1500 assignments to ensure virtual teams – whether fully remote, hybrid, or office-to-office – are productive and accountable.

We’ve found no better way to reduce stress and risk and get things done while saving time, particularly in the fast-paced world of 21st-century business. We expressly developed Days of the Week to handle the unpredictability of remote projects. Now you can use it as well, and ensure no team members, steps, or hurdles are ignored, and your remote teams deliver.

Visit this page on our website for more on Days of the Week and how to use it.