Author: Zachary Roush
COVID-19 forced many businesses to rapidly shift from operating in brick-and-mortar locations to remote workplaces. Working remotely, or working from home (WFH), is an entirely new situation for companies and poses unique challenges that you can easily overcome with the right approach.
Without an office workspace, managers often face employee management challenges like the low quality of work, communication breakdowns, and low social engagement.
In this article, you’ll find advice and tools to help companies and managers mitigate issues related to managing a WFH workforce.
How to Get the Most Productivity Out Of Your Workforce
Maintaining productivity and work quality is essential for any business. While many believe working down the hall from one another is the best method for managing your workforce, we’ve seen a handful of businesses shift to a WFH environment without any issues in productivity.
With the proper tools and technology, managers will find it easy to manage employees and encourage productivity.
Maximize Productivity with Powerful Tools
Managers can boost employee work quality with online tools. There are many tools to choose from for streamlining projects, organizing tasks, and supervising workloads.
Asana is an excellent tool for delegating projects and tasks to employees. You can set due dates, add subtasks and organize employees for each project. Asana is a great tool for marketing and advertising agencies with content-based projects.
Trello offers highly customizable task and project management. Trello’s unique user interface is very tactile, letting users drag “cards” from one column to another, in addition to checking off tasks. With a full suite of tools for automation, cloud integration, and more, Trello helps companies of all kinds manage tasks.
Hubstaff: Hubstaff provides a full suite of project management and hour tracking tools for managers. You can create projects, attach budgets to them and oversee employee work hours. Hubstaff also offers invoice creation, reporting, and talent acquisition. This tool is suitable for every industry.
Additional online work management tools include:
- Github (Software Development)
- Google Workspace (Word Processing, Email, Spreadsheets, Presentations, etc.)
- Office 365 (Similar to Google Workspace)
Once you choose the tools that function for your business, take the time to become an expert in those tools, then train your employees to be experts too.
Communication Breakdowns
Without routine and efficient communication, employees cannot be productive or successful. WFH presents many areas where communication can fail. Lengthy emails do not take the place of a quick trip to an employee’s office. Frequent video conferences don’t operate the same as in-person meetings.
Companies need to change how they communicate with employees when they work from home to ensure both productivity and employee engagement. The following section offers advice on how you can improve communication when working with remote employees.
Structure Your Communication for Success
Managers need to set new rules for employee communication. These rules should communicate when and how employees can contact you during the day. Establishing boundaries makes sure you don’t get bogged down in time-consuming tasks or resolving issues after work hours.
Your rules should lay out when teams will meet, how long they meet for, and what their agenda is. Packing an employee’s day with agenda-free meetings does not behoove their productivity. Schedule weekly one-on-one meetings to check in with employees and maintain personal contact.
New rules require new tools. Email, phone calls, and video calls can be time-consuming, requiring constant management to keep your schedule clear. For faster communication, to solve minor issues or answer simple questions, look into FreeConferenceCall.com. Employees can use these tools to stay in touch with each other for work tasks and community building.
Challenges in Employee Engagement
Without an office, employees can have a hard time casually interacting with other employees. Team-building efforts can slow and employees can lose personal engagement with the company and its mission. It’s important for businesses to provide remote engagement opportunities so that employees stay interested and connected to their colleagues.
Create Employee Connection Opportunities
Businesses operating from home have many virtual opportunities to support company culture and engagement. Managers should start by asking every employee to create a “Working with Me” document.
“Working with Me” documents explain each employee’s work habits, schedules, interests, and expectations. Use this to tailor your communication to each employee. Have employees share this document with others at the company to set clear expectations for everyone.
From there, build regular employee recognition into your schedule. Celebrate birthdays, life events, milestones, and more using video conferencing and online meeting tools. Recognition is crucial to making workers feel valued. Also, you can send gifts, have raffles, host online games, and virtual pizza parties. During meetings, be sure to leave time for coworkers to catch up before starting on the agenda.
How Has Your Transition to Remote Work Gone?
Is working from home going smoothly? Do you face challenges still? Let us know how you’ve overcome remote work challenges. Look through our collection of remote work articles for more solutions and ideas.
