COVID-19 pandemic, an unforeseen disaster has made the situation tensed all around the world. The restlessness due to the sudden outbreak has led to the situations of lockdown, but do you being a business owner can afford a sudden closure of your offices?
Obviously not! Most of the corporate offices, having a huge number of employees have declared work from home for their employee safety and to ensure that the workflow of the business doesn’t get affected.
Well, work from home is a great concept to adopt, but what most of the business owners are worried about is, whether their teams could remain productive while working remotely, especially in their personal space?
The concern of these employers is true as people when entering their personal space become more lethargic and it’s a fact. For all such employers who are stressed thinking about their team and the other work management aspects, here are some ways you can ensure productivity in your remote working team.
● Your reporting time doesn’t change
As every company has a reporting time for the company employees to arrive at the office and start their work, while the manager is assigning them their duties/tasks for the day to streamline the work process and get things done on time by the day end.
So while you and your team are trying to work from home, make sure you don’t change this procedure. Try to do the same things using different project management software. Softwares like TeamWork and Basecamp are a great option that helps make the project management process simpler and highly efficient with its features.
With the advanced feature of a timer with “Clock-in” and “Clock-out” options, it would be easier for you to track the work timings of your remote employees and will also be helpful for them to remain active as they are being tracked by a timer to finish their work on time.
● Make sure everyone is well equipped with resources
Lack of resources and limitations to the access of information and the other equipment can act as a reason behind the reduced productivity of an employee. Your employees might not be used to the work from home situations, many of them might also not have certain facilities like an internet pack or a well-featured laptop or working systems.
In the deficiency of access and other facilities, your employees might not have the clarity of work and would hardly be able to communicate with you about their queries and share their concerns to get things clarified, this would have a great effect on work deliverables and its quality. So while you are deciding to allow your employees to work from home, make sure you have given them enough access to the resources and if not, possibly suggest them an alternative way to get things done for you. Application of many team-building services that can help you fight COVID – 19 has come into limelight with the increased problem of working employees.
● Help them remain active virtually
In the world, where people sitting miles away can feel being together with smart gadgets, feeling like working together in a room, while working remotely is also a possible thing to happen.
While working from home, there might be chances that your employees would be in their comfort zone and the distractions attached with being at home, like pets disturbing the work or taking care of a child or cooking might act as a hindrance and might break your people’s concentration to work.
In order to keep them active and in a working zone, keeping all of them connected with a virtual network becomes important. Arrangement of a VPN for remote working users can help them remain connected with each other easily. Other virtual connectivity options like skype and hangouts can help them make normal conversations and file sharing convenient and handy to handle from their mobile devices.
Arranging the team meetings through video conferences using apps like Zoom can make your employees feel like they are sitting together and discussing their work like they used to do in the office. With giants like Google making a premium version of Hangouts Meet free for the remote workers has made the remote working process more exciting to work in.
● Give them a chance for remote social interaction
Your employees working at home might feel lonely without the daily interaction that they are used to having in the office infrastructure. Having these conversations between the employees is also important to make their work productivity better.
So while you are discussing or are planning to make a call, give them some time before the call to talk about the casual things that make the virtual working environment more realistic and they would have a little recreation along with the work that they are sticking to all day even when at home.
So just before you start your meeting, or while moving to the end of your call, give them some time to talk about, what they think of the current situation, is remote working going well for them? How did they spend their weekend? Doing this will make a lively environment to work and also give a sense of connectivity between the team even when they are working at a distance.
Summing Up
COVID – 19 or any other virus, the sudden situations can bring a change in any business whether small or big. The way you as a business owner will handle the situation will decide the results that this sudden crisis leaves on your organization.
Allowing your employees to work from home is one of those situations which when handled carefully can do wonders for you and your business. All you need to take care is about what efforts you can make to maintain the productivity of your team to ensure they deliver quality results.
With the above-mentioned tactics, you will get many ideas to make the work from home process smoother and easier to make your team stronger enough to tide over any wave by working in any situation without affecting their work and companies business goals.
Author Bio:
James Vargas is an experienced business expert, startup business consultant, and manager at Get Everything Delivered. With the 1.5-decade corporate experience, he is now sharing his guidance to start-ups to grow with corporate team building activities and project delivery solutions.