Transitioning your staff to work from home requires a lot of careful management and oversight. While it’s a big change for staff, it’s an even bigger change for somebody with managerial responsibility. Here are some useful tips about how to help your staff do their best possible work from home.
Set Up Regular Times to Check In
You should set up regular times to meet with staff members so they can keep you updated about what they’re working on. Ongoing supervisory meetings are a good opportunity to give people feedback and make sure that they stay on track when they’re acclimating to working from home. Also, it gives people a chance to ask you questions during a set time. This will help ensure that they speak up and ask questions when they’re unsure about something while also lessening the frequency that people may intermittently reach out with questions and interrupt what you’re focusing on.
Provide IT Support Solutions
Some of your team may be struggling to get used to working on a different system or using new work from home programs. Give them IT resources to help them transition and save them from getting frustrated or sidetracked by technical difficulties. A managed IT provider such as Iuvo Technologies can help your team get access to IT support when they’re having trouble with specific tasks and connecting remotely to your server or accessing material from a file share. In addition, they can help keep your network secure while people are accessing and sending information remotely.
Use Project Management Programs
People may need some help to facilitate collaboration on projects when they’re not seeing each other at the office every day. Using project management software can help people put their heads together and combine their efforts. People can track task completion and be clear about who’s responsible for each piece of a project. They can share ideas, share documents, and ask questions. This type of program will help keep you updated from a single centralized source rather than having to reach out to individual staff members.
Help Employees Manage Their Time Well
Some people’s day-to-day tasks may have changed up a little as a result of the work from home transition. In addition, the pace at which people perform certain tasks may have changed because they’re working more independently. Help people resolve how to use time efficiently and provide examples of approximately how much time they should need to spend on individual task assignments. This can help ensure that they assign time priorities accurately and don’t spend too much time on a single item.
Stay on Top of Timekeeping
You can use a tool to help people clock in and out while they’re working from home. A timekeeping program may be helpful for both nonexempt and exempt employees because it creates some accountability about working from home; it reinforces that people have to keep busy during working hours and not rush through assignments in order to work for less time.
Solicit Feedback
Your team is going to be able to give you valuable insight about what’s going well and what needs improvement. Ask your team members for feedback about how work is being handled and ask for suggestions about how to make things go more efficiently. They’ll appreciate that you value their input, and they’ll feel more comfortable talking to you about potential problems before they become potentially big problems.
Helping your staff to work productively from home takes some adaptability and resourcefulness. With the right supervisory input, helpful technological tools, and excellent IT support, you can help ensure that everyone on your team has a great work from home experience and your operations continue running successfully.
Veeramachineni Lalitha
I am Finance Content Writer. I write Personal Finance, banking, investment, and insurance related content for top clients including Kotak Mahindra Bank, Edelweiss, ICICI BANK and IDFC FIRST Bank. My experience details : Linkedin