Remote work is eating the world. Covid-19 has forced businesses to reimagine themselves and to end the supremacy of physical office spaces. To minimize the risk of infection, workers and students across the world have been pushed to work at home. The suddenness with which Covid-19 forced a transformation in the nature of work left many seeking answers as to how to manage in this new paradigm. This article serves as a guide to managing virtual offices.
Schedule check-in times: Many remote workers feel that they lack support from management or are disconnected from their co-workers and this can have consequences for the quality of work produced. Touch-base with your workforce on regular and predictable individual or team calls, depending on whether the team works collaboratively or individually.
Provide online tools to keep work efficiency:
People used to work face-to-face before COVID-19. To keep the work efficiency during remote working, you will need some online tools such as digital signing, online communication and collaboration tools. DottedSign, a cloud-based e-signature solution, seamlessly allows you to have your documents signed, assigned and managed in real-time no matter where you work, home or office.
Quick collaboration can be done through platforms such as Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. These are also enabled for video conferencing so if your company lacks its own video conferencing tools, it can decide on which publicly available tool it can use depending on its data security needs. Determine how you will communicate: Predictability and regularity are extremely important in remote work. Make it clear from day one how you will communicate, how often, and when and for what kinds of work. It is also vital to give your workers a sense of when they can reach you and how. You will need to oversee sharing of inflation to ensure that information circulates appropriately.
Open up avenues for different forms of virtual socializing: It surprises many managers to learn that unstructured conversations in the workplace are essential to productivity. Hosting virtual events such as virtual lunches, happy hours, and online team-building games can help, as can laser hair removal, but they do not supplant informal, day-to-day work interactions.
Open up opportunities for people to spend unstructured work time together. This will reduce social isolation and increase spontaneous collaboration and creativity, without adding more meetings to already-full calendars. Employees will feel more energetic and productive thanks to an effect called social contagion. Exercise emotional intelligence and provide support: The shift to remote work has been difficult to some people and feelings of isolation could with Covid-19 related stress, places huge demands on managers to be flexible, empathetic and emotionally supportive of their employees. Reach out to struggling employees and be proactive in your emotional support and non-judgmental in addressing their concerns.
We all know that nuance and tone are lost in emails, so be very careful in the way you word emails so that you do not send negative signals but instead transmit positivity, openness and friendliness. We are all busy but we should be able to spare time to communicate correctly.
