The COVID health crisis has compelled most industries to implement a work-from-home arrangement, which is proving to be a bane for most businesses. As such, remote work is a concept barely practiced by big companies that have conformed to the conventional office setup for ages.
It’s not typical, but it’s not new, either, and it’s certainly not impossible to manage. But first, ensure accessibility. If your company is not yet on the cloud, now is the best time to migrate gradually. Get in touch with experts for solutions on optimizing ServiceNow for HR and manager roles, wherever they might be working. Here’s how you can make the remote work setup work for you:
Manage your expectations
Before making your employees shift to a work-from-home setup, you should first shift your expectations of what work is. This is because efficiency is relative within remote work. In this transition, punctuality turns to availability, and attention becomes concentration. Thus, you need to determine what drives efficiency in your employees. What do you expect your employees to accomplish at the end of each day? How present should they be during online meetings?
Stop micromanaging and start trusting
When working from home, believe that your employees will use this freedom responsibly.
Therefore, avoid micromanaging. What’s the point of letting them work from home if you’re still going to breathe down their necks over tasks? What you can do instead is to assign them the responsibility of updating you on measurable benchmarks regularly. Keep your distance and stay open; should they fall short, this openness should enable them to speak freely about the lapse and how to correct it.
Create avenues for collaboration
If expectations are heard and accepted across the board, then everyone should be on board about creating a system. Such a system should include daily check-ins, regular video meetings, and complying with a standard work calendar. Any correspondence should be structured and time-based. Remember, you don’t have control over what they do with their time, but you do control what they bring to the table.
In expecting compliance from employees, make sure to offer several platforms for communications. Messaging applications, teleconferences, and even e-mail should be at everyone’s disposal.
Shift the break room banter online
Aren’t casual conversations redundant since they’re already comfortable at home? Not likely. Remote workers are prone to feelings of isolation, loneliness, or anxiety due to thinking they’re left behind or out of the loop. While this shouldn’t correlate to their productivity, it bears negative weight on your company culture and synergy.
Given the circumstance, asking about their day can be helpful. Get to know what keeps them busy beyond periodic work or how they distract themselves from it. Start channels dedicated to casual online chats and check-ins.
Leave things be
After months of adopting the remote work strategy, you’ll realize that the biggest lesson is just to let things be.
This doesn’t mean complacency; actually, it’s the opposite. By always being in the moment – creating the right communication channels and sticking to an agreed-upon system – you get a clear perspective of how your employees work and what else they value besides work. Suddenly, you start trusting people just as much as you do results. You don’t get to see this in a nine-to-five office setup.
Remote work is about letting your employees find a meaningful balance between life and work. Grant them this, and they’re guaranteed to perform just as well, if not better.
