The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has already affected several aspects of everyday life, including the way people work and think! An increasing number of businesses worldwide are now adjusting (if they haven’t already adjusted) to the concept of working remotely while adjusting to the new normal that’s being set for everyday life.
A recent Lenovo research that was conducted in mid-March this year portrayed how world employees now believe that this changing trend and larger shift to working from home will redefine how companies and business leaders think about their remote work strategies.
Read More: A Great Customer Experience Starts with Your Employees
The right choice of technologies and tools can enable better remote work policies for global businesses. While at this juncture where businesses and world economies are still working towards embracing ‘’the new normal,” it is crucial for teams, especially HR leaders and business owners to always give priority to the overall safety of their employees, their customers and everyone else who belongs to the company’s ecosystem. So keep that in mind!
Here are some general HR tips along with pointers on the best technologies and tools that businesses worldwide should focus on more during this uncertain time while creating a balance between a smart work from home policy for everyone across the hierarchy.
1- Collaboration Tools and The Right Workstation Hardware, for a Better Work from Home Experience!
Tech teams have become accustomed to the entire work from home concept over the years. This working style is not new to the IT industry. But the ongoing pandemic has just made it more of a need and the idea is now shifting to other sectors and industries too.
Depending on a particular employee’s role at hand, HR leaders should ensure that their staff have access to the right tools and even hardware to perform their tasks well from home.
It is common for several people to use two computers or monitors while in the office, especially if they need to focus on detailed work. So if there are employees who are used to a certain set up at the office and they now need to work from home for an unknown duration of time- companies need to enable their setup, to ensure the same level of productivity.
On the one hand, giving employees the right laptops, desktops and software becomes crucial. On the other, providing the right training and investing in the same tools for everyone across the hierarchy not only boosts productivity but helps the team stay connected. For instance, having globally distributed teams install collaboration tools to ease coordination is one part of the equation. Ensuring teams are able to seamlessly communicate with each other is another!
This is the time where there’s been a peak in the use of collaboration software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, Glip and others. Keeping the team active and online on one platform also helps them feel connected to each other at a time where social distancing is the norm.
During this time, when employees too are struggling to cope with the effects on the pandemic of personal life, going a step further by complementing them with noise cancelling headphones can be a good idea too! It will definitely help them during client calls and other important virtual meetings.
Read More: Covid-19: And How It’s Changing The Way Companies Operate
2- Maintaining (Fixed and Flexible!) Schedules
There are several pros of the whole work from home concept, but with it come a share of cons as well. Covid-19 is the reason for the current state of changes at the workplace. It is important for business leaders and HR heads to keep in mind that the pandemic has affected other facilities like access to day care and child care centers, for instance.
While teams have found their own way to try and maintain a schedule while working from home, HR leaders or team leaders can help by being flexible when it comes to work hours but also keeping a certain schedule for distributed teams.
To help ensure a better seamless remote work experience, specifying active work hours for the whole team will help people coordinate better with each other and it will help professionals with larger families plan their day more effectively.
At the same time, being flexible when needed and focusing on the tasks that need completion helps in creating a seamless business experience for everyone involved.
By putting down work timings, remote teams will have a formal start time and end time and it will help give them structure to their day.
Furthermore, it is prudent to keep in mind that advances in technology have allowed employees to stay connected all the time and work from anywhere. But that does not mean that employees have to be on call 24/7. Maintaining a ‘’work day’’ with proper ‘’work hours’’ while working from home can help follow a good work life balance and also maintains productivity.
3- Communicate with Teams More often
Social distancing is needed to help mitigate the effects of Covid-19. While working remote though, it is common for teams to feel disconnected during this phase.
This is where HR leads and team managers can step in- by communicating with individual members on the team more proactively and more often.
These regular communication channels should not only be used to get an update on tasks or the state of the business, but to also keep a light banter going. Keeping a regular ongoing one to one communication channel with everyone will also help align teams and people to the overall business mission. While doing so, keep defining their scope of work and role to ensure clarity!
Given the level of anxiety being seen in employees because of the Covid-19 affect, this is a time for HR to help the staff sail through these rough times while focusing on business productivity at the same time!
According to Lenovo’s recent global research, 77% of employees surveyed felt that companies will be more open to or even encourage letting workers work remotely once businesses get through this period.
4- Teams Need a Different Kind of Employee Experience To Help Ensure Business Continuity
Several industry leaders have spoken about the importance of a strong work culture and the importance of building a good employee experience strategy. This is what led to a shift in how HR teams were planning and redefining their employee experience strategies over the recent past. But the onset of Covid-19 now demands a different kind of employee experience.
Since the early 2000s, the number of work from home professionals has grown by 159% and this number is set to move upwards given the current situation.
This will lead to a shift in which technologies leaders choose to implement as part of the HR Tech stack.
A balance of the right workforce, right attitude and right tools can ensure business continuity at a time when companies need it the most to help tide through economic uncertainties.
When it comes to enabling a seamless remote work experience, use of cloud technologies is crucial to maintaining business data and alignment. With the changes being driven into the working world as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, usage of cloud based platforms like Microsoft Teams has increased, with the product now boasting of approximately 75 Million daily active users.
Read More: Are You Ready For A Post-Pandemic Working World?
And given the need to drive more virtual prospect and client meetings during this time, video conferencing has exploded. Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google was recently quoted as saying that there were now over 100 million daily Meet participants and a 30x growth since January of this year. We all know how Zoom has seen a big jump in daily users as well, while even tools like Slack have witnessed a major surge in growth.
Now is the time for HR and IT to shift the focus onto ensuring business continuity by balancing employee experience with the right tools and technologies, and the best way to do this is by enabling good remote work practices!