More and more businesses are choosing to allow their employees to work from home. Whether this is a response to the world situation, whether it’s a way to cut costs, or whether it’s because it will make your employees happier and, therefore, more productive, the reasons will always be your own. However, whatever the reason behind this decision, it’s crucial that you can manage your remote workers and ensure that everything is running smoothly within your business. This is not as easy as when everyone is in the office and you can oversee what is happening with a glance, so some extra measures will need to be put in place. Read on to find out what some of your options are.
Establish Daily Check-Ins
If you’re allowing home working, you’ll need to be able to trust your team to get on with their work without close supervision. If you feel that you need to micromanage your employees, offering them the option of home working will not work out well for you, as you’ll be constantly worried about what everyone else is doing and not getting on with your own work – productivity will fall.
However, what you can do is establish regular daily check-ins. This might be a morning meeting, for example. Taking just 10 minutes or so at the start of each day, you can make sure that everyone is logged in and happy with the work they have been set. This is the perfect opportunity for staff to ask any questions before the day begins, plus you can check everyone is where they should be.
You can also make yourself available throughout the day so that anyone who needs to get in touch can do. Ensuring you have researched the telecom industry and having the right technology in place will help ensure this can happen and give everyone a sense of security throughout the day.
Give Options
Everyone’s home office setup will be different, and they will all have different equipment (unless you choose to provide everyone with a tablet or laptop, for example) and working areas. This can mean that you may have to give people options. Some might have a Mac at home, whereas others have a PC. Some might only have a tablet, and others might not have an up to date smartphone. There are many variations.
Try to offer as much choice as possible so that everyone can do their work without any problems. You might even allow for changes in routine to fit in with the optimum working environment in someone’s home. They might have worked from 9am until 5pm in your office, but would it be better for them to now work from 5am until 1pm, or from 2pm until 11pm if that suits them better? This might allow better productivity and can be a great way to manage your team.
Create Rules
Finally, although most people will work just as well and as hard when they are at home compared to when they are in the office, others will find it much more challenging. This is why you’ll need to create some rules that everyone has to stick to.
The rules shouldn’t be too restrictive (we’ve already mentioned how flexibility can improve productivity), and they should be easy to follow. This will help people establish more of a routine and keep them happy.
