Isolation and social distancing have become the norm across the whole world over these past few months in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
With most offices forced to close and public transport reduced for a while, businesses like yours have been forced to take unprecedented measures to allow your entire team to work from home.While this remote working setup is important in ensuring the health and safety of your employees, it also poses many challenges for both management and workers alike – making it difficult to be productive and maintain business as usual.
Fortunately, there are certain ways in which you can assist your teams during this pandemic.
Here are our tips to help you support your remote workforce during the COVID-19 Crisis.
Why is it essential for businesses to support their remote workforce?
Working from home may not be a big deal for some.
But for the majority who are used to the daily bustle of the office, communicating in person with colleagues and completing their tasks at their usual workstations, working remotely may make them feel completely lost.
These conditions can lower their productivity due to:By reaching out and supporting your staff during these unprecedented times, your business will benefit because your staff will remain productive, efficient and high performing – even from home.
1. Ensure that your employees are equipped with the essential tools and resources they need
Provide them with the hardware, software and equipment necessary to accomplish tasks. Where possible, use cloud-based platforms such as Microsoft Office 365, Zoom, Slack and OneDrive so it’s easy for them to access, send and receive files, reports and data.
You should also encourage them to be transparent with any technical problems so that you can assist them sooner.
2. Be flexible and considerate with their situation.
You can’t assume that by working from home, all of your employees will be back to normal as if they were still in the office. Some people have extenuating circumstances and responsibilities to attend to during this time, like childcare, elderly care and home-schooling obligations.
Be understanding that this is not business as usual right now. It’s best to compromise on what kind of leeway you can provide and what schedule suits both them and the business.
3. Provide them with clear plans and action steps.
With the state of the world at the moment, everyone is anxious and feeling a little uncertain.
While you’re not expected to have all the answers, it will help if you can provide some reassurance and transparency around the business’ plans going forward. This will help you build trust and motivate them to be more dedicated during these difficult times.
4. Encourage online collaboration.
You can reduce the social isolation and loneliness of your employees by hosting online virtual meetings. May it be for work meetings or just a quick huddle or catch-up with the team, talking to them using audio or video conferencing allows your workers to feel the company’s presence and that everyone is still reachable.
5. Communicate as often as you can.
How will you support your employees if you are not keeping in touch? How can you maintain their loyalty if you are not doing anything to keep them engaged? How will you ensure that they have the means to perform at their best if you are not asking them?
Communication is the key to ensuring everyone remains healthy and committed during this crisis. Luckily, there are a lot of available options to get your workforce collaborating and productive during COVD-19.
VibeCatch offers an effective solution to easily reconnect with your employees, even when they are working from home.
It’s more important than ever that your business is monitoring and measuring employee engagement, performance and well-being.
By collecting ongoing valuable insights from all employees through one powerful platform, you’ll be able to learn how you can improve your company and its operations. VibeCatch helps you by using active, scientific-based listening to learn more about your internal workforce and generate better, trackable results.
Try our FREE company-wide poll
Want to engage your remote workforce?
Our simple and anonymous poll can help you remain connected with an increasingly remote workforce and assist you in ensuring your team have what they need to perform.
Click here to set up your free poll now to start communicating with your employees more effectively.