Employees Working Remotely: How To Make It Work
More and more, people are working remotely, from home or other locations other than the office itself. This has its ups and downs for sure, but if you know how to leverage it as a business you might be surprised at just how effective and useful it can really be for you and your company. The truth is that there are a few things you might want to bear in mind in order to try and make this work as well as possible.
In this post, we’ll go through some of those things, so you can have a much better understanding and opportunity to enjoy working remotely, and to ensure that you are able to make it work as well as possible. Let’s take a look.
Try Hybrid First
If you have not yet tried remote working across your team, and you are hoping to try and start doing this, you might want to think about how you are going to be able to make this work as well as possible. A good way to dip your toe into it, so to speak, is to try a hybrid approach first. This way, your employees are still able to work out of the central hub if they want, and that can lead to a certain feeling of unification with your employees and the business.
Of course, this means not quite giving up the office yet, which may or may not actually be what you are hoping for anyway. All in all, it’s a good stepping stone, and you should be able to get a sense of how remote working works, what you need to do to make it a success, and what kinds of infrastructure you need in place to help it along.
Get The Tech Set Up
Of course, for any kind of remote working, you are going to soon find that you have a strong need for some technical solutions to help things along. If you can get the tech set up effectively and properly, then you are going to find that this makes the remote working setup much better for all involved. So what kind of tech might you want to have in place to ensure that this is going to work for you?
First of all, you need to ensure that your employees have a decent way to communicate with you and with other people in their teams. So you’ll want to focus on some of the solutions that can help with that - whether that means using an online messaging service, or whether you want to get a cloud telephony service as well. It’s up to you, just make sure that there is some good way to contact one another.
Beyond that, you will need to make sure that they have the tools to do their work at home. You may need to furnish people with laptops, to ensure this, or you may not. It’s something you will need to research and figure out as soon as possible.
Checking In
One question that a lot of employers have is to do with checking in. You obviously want it to still feel as though you are a team and that you know what your employees are getting up to. But you may want to do that without actually being over their shoulder, even digitally so to speak. So it’s all about finding a good way to check in enough that they know you are watching them respectfully, but so they don’t feel that you are actually overtly there all the time.
This could be a simple email once a day to see how they are getting on, or you might decide to hold some meetings a couple of times a day. It all depends on the work and how much you need to watch over them, but this is just another thing that you will need to make sure you are figuring out before you do anything else.
The Role Of Feedback
Especially in the early days, you’ll need to make sure that your employees are as happy as possible with the situation. So you should seek out feedback from them and make sure that they are happy with it, ask them what could be better and so on. Seeking and soliciting feedback, and improving on the back of it, is a hugely important way to improve the experience for your employees, so this is definitely something you should do. If you do, it will be better for everyone.