While remote work policies have largely been an experiment, with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, they are swiftly becoming a need for many businesses, at least in the short-term, particularly because they can be a win-win situation for both employers and employees. Employee engagement, retention, and morale are all well-known benefits, as well as the potential to extend your talent pool and attract or hire stronger individuals.
Although it is preferable to have clear remote work strategies and policies ahead of time, in terms of crisis, most firms have not been able to achieve this degree of preparation in the event of a global pandemic such as the COVID pandemic. However, just because your company was forced to go remote with little to no planning does not mean you cannot optimize your remote work strategy to increase productivity.
Having a good understanding of the main remote working challenges facing your employees and putting together a clear plan and strategy in place will make remote work a viable option, whether it is something you temporarily turn to as the world “hunkers down,” or it is something that becomes a more permanent component of your workplace.
What is a remote work strategy and what are some of the challenges of its implementation?
When faced with a completely remote sort of work, a company’s remote work strategy is a long-term plan established to ensure continued productivity, efficiency, and the greatest possible employee experience. At the heart of an ideal remote work strategy is a digital workplace platform that enables businesses to harness the productivity of their workforces by providing an environment conducive to remote work.
We have all heard about the advantages of working from home, but there’s more to the story! Remote work might be a significant adjustment if you have always run your business from a physical location with your entire crew there. Let’s begin by examining what appears to be some of the most significant challenges of working remotely.
- Limited access to appropriate technology or quick resolution of technical issues.
- Information may be lost in translation due to a lack of cohesion and communication among staff.
- Having trouble unplugging after work or keeping a work-life balance
- Employees may feel isolated as a result of a lack of teamwork and socialization.
5 tips to optimize a remote work strategy for your business
While we are in a brief time of greater remote work, organizations that adopt practices such as utilizing the cloud and essential technological tools, maintaining compliance and workplace culture on some level will reap long-term benefits. Are you interested in learning how you could make your remote work successful as well?
Let’s take a deep dive on a few of the aforementioned steps to help you get started.
- Streamline critical business procedures by moving them to the cloud
The first step in optimizing a remote work strategy for a company is to digitize and convert internal business operations into simplified workflows, then move them to the cloud.
Digitizing, simplifying, and organizing business processes can boost an organization’s overall efficiency and transparency. It also ensures that teams can track processes and receive real-time updates. By moving process administration to the cloud, distant personnel may verify assigned procedures and assess any modifications made in real time, which can boost collaboration.
Furthermore, by digitizing procedures, you may automate repetitive sections of the processes, thus saving time and money.
- Implementing the essential technological tools can make or break a project
Remote work would be practically impossible without technology because remote teams require powerful remote solutions to support communication and collaboration across time zones, boost efficiency, and handle complicated procedures. However, simply deploying the most up-to-date technology and solutions and expecting them to improve and optimize your remote work approach will not be enough. You will need technical tools that are compatible with your company’s goals, culture, and employee needs. If your technical tools are too complicated or aren’t a suitable fit for your company, they’ll just complicate things for your employees and cause extra problems.
While adding more tools to your already-expanding digital infrastructure may appear to be a quick fix, they can raise business costs, disperse data and conversations, and make it tough for your employees to keep track of everything.
- Incorporate workplace culture and employee experience into your remote work strategy
A work culture that entails some degree of solitude can throw numerous curveballs at the assimilation process for individuals who are used to working in an office setting. Working collaboratively in person to needing to adapt to a collaborative expectation in a physically remote setup may be the most jarring shift. Employees and employers must learn how to deal with the changes in internal communication. Another thing to consider is what happens when homes start to serve as offices. Identifying how to strike a balance between personal and professional lives will be a learning curve for employees, as the line dividing the two will oftentimes be blurred.
- Create a communication route for your remote workforce
A clear communication strategy is at the heart of any successful remote work plan and now is an excellent opportunity for you and your team to come to an agreement on how you will communicate in the future. A number of collaboration alternatives, like video conferencing services and apps for facilitating inter-office interaction, are now available for free in light of the countless workplaces forced to stay home while the coronavirus outbreak fades.
On a daily basis, leaders must convey precisely what they expect from each employee. It’s critical to define roles, responsibilities, and deadlines. Managers must guarantee that all staff accomplish their jobs on time and to a uniform standard, rather than focusing solely on quantitative time tracking. Employees distrust and are oftentimes dissatisfied with tools like electronic time stamps because they feel governed by them.
When it comes to task management, online task management technologies that are accessible to all team members are far more suitable for measuring productivity.
- Maintaining compliance is essential
Adapting to the new reality of a telecommuting paradigm also necessitates a change in how compliance standards are handled. This is much more complicated for businesses with a worldwide workforce, since they will have to comply with both their own country’s legislation and those of the nations where their personnel reside and work. These requirements are well-defined in traditional office environments, but when the majority (if not all) of your staff work from home, reorganizing your compliance program to ensure that your newly remote organization is legally compliant might leave a lot of gray areas.
Contact us to learn more and explore options on how your company can also benefit from remote work
The magnitude of the response to the COVID-19 epidemic has been genuinely unparalleled. Despite the fact that implementing a strategy to allow your staff to work from home is a difficult endeavor, it shouldn’t feel scary or unachievable. We are simply offering these tips in the hope that they will be useful as more people and enterprises transition to remote work.
Here at Getinnotized, our remote work expert team provides you with a dedicated point of contact prepared to address the many needs of your company’s newly remote workers.
Please contact us if you require assistance!
