Making Remote Work Beneficial For the Organization
As businesses come to terms with the fact that the abrupt transition to remote work we experienced in March and April of 2020 is doubtful to repeat itself, managers face a serious hurdle: how to make remote work a sustainable and effective element of their long-term workforce approaches.
Several studies on the remote and dispersed professional experience of workers have a lot to offer corporate leaders. To begin, concentrate on the terms “employee experience.” For most of us, work from home has become a lifeline — it’s how we and our businesses are grappling with the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 disease outbreak.
We were more focused on maintaining the job we were being used to do in a collocated professional workplace as we hurried out of our offices and into our lounge room and kitchens. Replicating workplace procedures in our homes, it appears, doesn’t end up making for highly satisfying workplace culture.
To make remote work efficient, one of the most crucial components is for workers and managers to realize that “we’re all in this together, and have common obligations.”
Keep an eye out for signs of employee dissatisfaction.
To gain insight into employees’ fears and difficulties, use both direct interactions and indirect observations. Make it perfectly clear to staff that you respect and care for them at all times. Provide managers with advice on how to better broach sensitive topics emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, such as alternative work models, job security and opportunities, effects on staffing, and organizational stress, in order to promote daily discussions among managers and employees.
Employees should be given the necessary tools
Ensure that workers have the equipment they want to succeed, which could include more than just a phone and a laptop. Do your staff, for example, have sufficient cameras to conduct virtual meetings?
Even if you don’t have a lot of technology and collaboration resources, you can equip your workers to operate efficiently from home. However, don’t presume that people are familiar with virtual communications or that they are secure in that world.
Encourage people to chat
Manager-employee dialogue guarantees that collaboration activities help instead of hinder employee involvement. Employees’ comprehension of the organization’s actions and their consequences during the transition, according to Gartner research, is much more crucial to the success of a change process than employees’ “liking” the change.
Have faith in your staff
Social cohesion between employees is everything an organization needs. “Right now, the greatest thing you could do as a manager is reduce your skepticism and place your trust in your workers that they’re doing the proper job — which they will if employers have a part of the value,” Kropp says.
Managers can be worried and even irritated that they no longer have continuous insight into their workers, but they should not react by micromanagement. Employees can become disengaged and exhausted as a result of this. Don’t get caught up in potential performance issues; once the crisis has passed, you’ll have plenty of time to rely on proven performance management processes.
