With the world still not close to overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic, companies all over the U.S. are encouraging their employees to work from home and maintain social distancing. While certain companies may have already had remote working policies in place, others would have had to adjust to this new paradigm shift and allow employees to work from home.
This concept of ‘work from home’ becomes even more challenging when there are employees who aren’t able to attend to work-related tasks, either because they’re sick or are facing other challenges during this time.
So, how do you ensure that your employees, who are working from home, deliver high-quality work consistently?
While it’s a global pandemic, everyone’s experience and reaction to this crisis is different and that could have a major effect on daily deliverables at work. During such times, the best approach is to put your understanding of employee strengths and struggles to good use and personalize how you manage and communicate with them and create working arrangements that meet your needs and theirs.
By doing so, you ensure the wellbeing of your employees, while meeting deadlines, and without compromising the quality of work. This way, it’s easier to keep clients satisfied and make sure employees are happy and healthy, both mentally and physically.
One of the major challenges you could be facing as a result of this crisis is the inability to ensure that all the work is completed, when certain employees are forced to stay away from work. In these situations, you’ll have to assign these responsibilities to another employee.
In these instances, the best practice would be to identify a member of your team, who shares similar skills, strengths, and characteristics as the employee who’s absent, who would find these responsibilities relatively easier to take on, compared to other team members.
Certain psychometric tools help you do this by helping you compare employee skills, tasks, and personalities with varying degrees of compatibility. Using these insights to allocate work ensures that work is completed with greater precision and skill.
From communicating across teams to collaborating on shared tasks, technology is your best friend while employees work from home.
To ensure that your employees are communicating and collaborating with these tools effectively and meaningfully, you must use them in a way that lines up with their communication styles.
You must also encourage members across teams and departments to enhance their approach to communicating with each other by identifying these characteristics and personality insights. By doing so, you create a culture where team members are considerate of others’ struggles and engage meaningfully with each other.
Communication tools such as Slack allows users to incorporate HR or psychometric tools into its platform, helping you get a deeper understanding of your teammates. Utilize these tools to make communication more effective and collaboration much smoother among your employees.
Meetings are a necessity when implementing a work from home strategy.
Make your meetings more productive by understanding who you are engaging with, specifically in terms of their communication, collaboration, and learning styles. You can leverage such information to cut down unnecessary meeting time and make meetings more productive and goal-oriented.
On the Wired2Perform platform, its newly-added calendar features help your harness these analytics seamlessly. You can even integrate these features with popular meeting platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Office 365 and leverage deep insights while you engage with your teams.
Working from home during the coronavirus outbreak is a trying time for both employers and employees as productivity becomes a struggle.
In the absence of the office atmosphere and without the in-built discipline that comes with working from the office, trying to complete a daily to-do list is not always an easy task. It’s also a challenge for employers to place trust and autonomy in their employees to deliver quality work on time.
At Wired2Perform, we’re dedicated to helping businesses and teams who are challenged by the sudden shift in the work paradigm. We’re now offering the use of our platform FREE of charge, for 90 days, for organizational user accounts to help you navigate WFH more effectively and overcome common challenges. Good luck!
