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Effective Ways to Boost Business Productivity While Keeping Employees At Home

By | Stella Lincoln

There are several reasons why companies nowadays are promoting work from home culture for their organizations. While the current pandemic requires organizations to take isolations measures and promote social distancing, work from home is also a major factor for reducing the carbon footprint.

It is quite cost-effective, saves time, and offers a lot of flexibility for both the company and the employees. According to a report published by Fundera, over 5 million employees in the US work from home at least half the time as of 2020. AW (alternative workplace) or telecommuting has become widely popular, and the number of people working from home has grown by 175% since 2005.

Ways to Boost Employee Productivity at Home

In light of above information, let us look at some of the ways through which you can ensure that employee productivity never dwindles if you switch to a remote working model. So let’s jump right into them: 

1.    Augmented Collaborations

A great way to ensure that your employees stick to the plan and follow your desired instruction even when working from home is foster collaborations between them. In order to do so, you need to provide them with a compelling cause that piques their interest, establish expectations clearly, and lure them into chasing after organizational goals.

When your employees work in a team, then there is sharing of knowledge, ideas to reward and notions for improvements are discussed, and people can be held accountable to play their part as well as fulfill their duties.

However, for work from home scenarios, you need to augment collaborations using efficient tech support and optimize usage of productivity tools which I shall discuss later on in this post. 

2.    Dedicated Workstations

Our surroundings and environment do impact our performance and level of productivity. This is why you should encourage and motivate your employees to arrange for themselves a dedicated workstation at their home.

This has a lot of benefits for them and their performance. First of all, a dedicated workplace means that all of their utensils and work-related appliances would be available to them in an organized way. Secondly, it will also ensure that they are able to avoid unnecessary interruptions from their surroundings during work hours or when performing their tasks.

This will increase their focus on the unfinished work to be delivered, plus it will also induce a working vibe that will allow their minds to function more effectively and efficiently.  

3.    Logins on a Daily Basis

When you establish a daily check-in system for your employees working from home, they know that it is essential for them to make themselves available for a ZOOM meeting or a group Skype call. Plus a daily face time between managers and employees also institutes a sense of urgency, accountability, and responsibility. You are essentially creating connections and conveying priorities here.

However, a daily check-in should only be held once a day and never more than that. So it could be an early morning meeting or a late evening closing. You can set agendas for your meetings, discuss issues and concerns faced by your team, make sure everything is fine, and analyze performances of tasks and sub-tasks to name a few. 

4.    Efficient Tech & Productivity Tools

Remote work without a doubt requires remote access tools to enable employees to work with company data and information. They also require tech support to carry on their tasks and deliver their work on time without delays.

Email access is absolutely necessary, plus your IT department should make sure that all software requirements are also met adequately and promptly for each employee. If your company uses a database management system, then you need to make sure that employees are able to work on it and have remote access that is safe and secure.

There are a lot of productivity tools out there that your employees can use to improve their performance and reduce time-lags when performing their tasks. Offer them the right tools and make sure they have fully functioning equipment with them to avoid any inconveniences during working hours.

5.    Build Interactions & Engagement

If you want to increase productivity at your workplace and observe a definite increase in your profits, engaging your employees and building healthy interactions amongst them is extremely important. This way, everyone gets to have a chance to contribute towards achieving business objectives. Your company thus does not only become profitable but also a much happier and sustainable place of work.

For teams working at home, you need to engage your employees by making them feel like business partners. Coach them leadership skills and hold them accountable for their tasks. Never be afraid to expose them to new challenges as it can potentially help them to expand their knowledge base.

6.    Mutually Agreed Expectations

Like I mentioned earlier, all expectations from your employees should be referred to them through a clear oral or written presentation. There should absolutely be no ambiguities or any room for them to be confused. Make this simple and easy to understand. Plus it has to be mutually agreed upon on whatever you, your manager, and workforce decides.

Work from home does give the employees leverage to make use of their time as they see fit. Plus you cannot just visit their desk and stand on top of their shoulders to check if they are doing as told. So trust them and delegate responsibilities but also make them accountable for the task as well.

7.    Promote Company Culture

Even when your team is working from home, organizations should seek out ways to promote company culture. This influences your employees and their thought process as they consider themselves to be a part of the bigger picture. So in actuality, I’m asking you to promote a remote culture. One way to go about is to document everything and make it accessible to all employees.

This makes their actions and performances public (within the company). Another way is to incorporate cloud solutions that can be made accessible to anyone. Workplace and team management applications like Asana, Centrallo, Trello, and the rest are all great ways to keep your team on the same page.

8.    Regular Contact & Routine Checks

While a daily check-in is appreciable only once per day, that doesn’t mean that you should break contact with your employees for the rest of the say. There is WhatsApp, email service your office uses, and we all have smartphones. So there is a number of ways you can stay connected with your employees, and technology today offers you various means to do so.

Hence there shouldn’t be much of a concern at all. However, it is important that you keep a soft reminder in the back of their mind, that everyday company is investing in them, and they have a professional duty to complete their given tasks. No one likes to be nagged, so create a balance in your communication or some protocols that govern how and when you contact your employees. 

9.    Transparency at Work

Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier, and most probably transparency at work is what can help you to cross-check employee performances and also assist you to monitor their productivity. This also sends them a message that shortcomings and pitfalls at work even when telecommuting cannot stay hidden.

One sure-fire way to instill transparency at work is through making every action measurable as well as magnanimous is to use and implement KPIs (key performance indicators). Your managerial team, department leads, and other bosses in your company have to be educated about them so that they can relay their information down the stream of hierarchy.

You need to make sure that everyone is on board with policies and regulations so that any sort of frailties at work can be shunned completely. 

Conclusion

While managing the productivity of your workers in an office environment itself can be quite daunting, there is no doubt that technology has various solutions to manage teams working remotely.

However, the foundation of remote work culture originates from robust policy-making and ensuring that company regulations are firmly established as well as known by each member of your team.

Your leadership should define the dos and the don’ts with any ambiguity while the rest can be handled through progressive tools that are quite handy once you get to familiarize with them.

Boosting your business productivity while your teams telecommute is not only possible but an extremely viable aspect that shouldn’t pose any challenges or difficulties.


Author Bio

Stella Lincoln currently works as a Business Executive at Dissertation Assistance, a reliable platform for higher education students to acquire cheap assignment service from expert writers 24/7. During her free time, she likes to perform using her vocal skills to sing songs for local charity events

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