How to empower your employees to achieve more when working from home in 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has revolutionized they way team members and supervisors communicate and work together.
After nearly a year of remote working, research shows that working from home has proven beneficial to both employers (reduced costs for the workplace) and employees (no commuting, so increased productivity).
However, after being cooped up in houses staring at the same 4 walls and doing the same work all year long, employers might need to implement newer ways to engage their employees and ensure productivity.
Here are 10 tips that will help you support your remote workers better and keep your business developing during these uncertain times.
1) Set clear objectives for your staff
For your workers to achieve and do the best they can, supervisors have to set manageable goals for their employees carefully. It’s important to challenge your staff, but too much work and unrealistic objectives will only intimidate and dishearten your staff.
Make sure to set clear objectives you want each of your team members to obtain, and remember to communicate exactly what and how you want your members to do.
2) Build a sense of belonging among your employees
Try and make your workers feel like they are supported, heard, and accepted as they are. When employees sense that they are truly included, it shows them that the business perceives them as valuable member of the organization and cares for them as individuals.
Make sure to bring everyone on board with your decisions so that no one is left out.
3) Maintain open lines of communication
Setting up in-person or virtual meetings every once in a while is crucial for a business. Team members and managers need to touch base regularly to ensure they are on the same page as their co-workers.
Remind your employees that apart from communicating with their executives, they need to be having open discourse with each other.
4) Check-in and provide feedback
Periodic check-ins with your remote members can be a great way to help them overcome the challenges they might face during their daily remote work.
You don’t want to come off as micromanaging, but you also want them to feel safe coming to you with a problem.
Be sure to let your employees know how and when they can reach you if they face a problem, and when they do, be constructive and clear. The last thing anyone wants while working from home is messages getting lost in translation.
5) Encourage on-going participation
Suggest your employees engage with other on-going projects even if they are not physically there. When members of teams meet up, ideas can flow, and creativity is boosted.
Don’t limit your team members to just daily check-ins; encourage them to engage themselves in other conversations, communicate, and implement new and exciting ideas.
6) Reward your employees after a hard time of work
While face-to-face feedback and office celebrations are no longer an option for remote working teams, finding new ways to show appreciation to your workers is important.
Recognize your staff for the great work they are doing by either organizing celebratory video calls, posting their achievements on a company-wide platform, or even getting gifts for staff.
Please don’t wait until the matter is no longer relevant. If you see someone doing something that needs to be rewarded, recognize them while they are still excited and inspired to grow. Appreciation can go a long way in boosting morale when all the employees have been sitting indoors and feeling isolated.
7) Promote knowledge sharing
The hardest challenge remote workers face is figuring out who and where to get their information from. Instead of wasting hours trying to look for the right information, remote workers should have the relevant knowledge at their fingertips.
Establish with your team that to have the best performance possible, they can help share the right information and sources with each other. If even one team member is kept in the dark, instead of having a more efficient and productive workflow, it can become redundant to the point where you now have to spend double the time to bring everyone on board. Sharing is caring.
8) Provide people with the tools they need to work from home
As a manager or supervisor, you need to be prepared to provide your employees with the tools they need to work successfully while at home. Keep up to date with management, storage space, video conferencing, and other tools so that files and information sharing doesn’t become a hassle.
These tools should be easy to navigate, both for managers and staff members. The onboarding of new employees should also be seamless with the remote working software.
9) Offer opportunities for career advancement
If employees feel that their growth bar has reached the ceiling, that’s when you should start getting worried. What keeps people interested in the job they have is knowing that gradually they will be able to advance to higher positions in their fields.
Just because people are working from home doesn’t mean they don’t crave the feeling of reaching higher grounds and being promoted.
As a manager, you should be willing to support your talent and recognize their need to grow and help them develop their careers.
10) Encourage team collaboration
Establish an environment for your staff so that they can offer peer-to-peer feedback to each other. This promotes engagement and communication and helps them learn from other team members. Keep the feedbacks motivational and constructive.
The more your support your employees, the more your business will thrive
The pandemic has changed how businesses operate, and employees can do nothing but be compliant with how this shift in workflow occurs. Employers can do the best thing for their workers during these times to provide the best possible environment where members can trust each other.
The silver lining of the pandemic – increasing the employee productivity for businesses – has shown that some, if not the majority of the organizations, if possible, are going to want to continue with the way things are even after the pandemic is resolved.
So the better you support and empower your employers, the more your business is going to thrive.
Photo by Jenny Ueberberg
