Struggles are real
- 70% employees find it difficult to contribute or be
- 28% of remote workers are challenged by burnout and complain of being disconnected from work
- 78% said they felt more inclusive in an office working environment
- 62% of employees say that they might think of resigning from a on-premise work organization to a company that offers remote work.
What Changed?
Future of Work involves a mix of hybrid and remote. Today, we see several companies tilting towards the use of remote working models.
While 98% of employees say they would love to continue working remotely, certain pitfalls come along with it since it is a new model & no model is perfect, especially at the start.
WHAT ARE THE TOP STRATEGIES WE CAN ADAPT TO MAKE REMOTE WORK, WORK.
Avoid micromanagement
Remote workers must feel trusted rather than being controlled or micromanaged.
How can you avoid this?
- Give Employees autonomy while completing their work to boost effectiveness.
- Create systems of check-ins where you can collaborate and schedule regular meetings for project updates.
- Leaders must lead by example by staying away from the intricacies of team members’ daily work as much as possible.
Allow Flexibility
More employers are rolling the punches to allow flexibility in the post-pandemic world.
According to LinkedIn's Global recruiting trends, more than 80% of employers believe work flexibility improved their employer branding.
How can we ensure this?
- Create flexible workspaces that allow non-traditional timings.
- Trust employees to manage their time and effort.
- Shift the focus to user-driven processes and acknowledge that there are more than one ways to get things done.
Automate Tasks
Productivity tools and automation has taken over every workplace today.
Nearly 60% of employees want better task automation to deliver better quality outputs.
How to crack this?
- Efficiently manage tasks, improve collaborations, and monitor progress with project management softwares.
- Set up systems and processes for continuous project updates and structured allocation with clearly defined delivery timelines.
- Stimulate better communication and responses with reduced call updates and time management by automating tasks.
Communication Guidelines
Pre-deciding the modes of communication helps in streamlining workflow and remote teams.
Tools like Asana, Zoom, MSTeams, Slack, Notion have picked up the pace to keep teams on the same page.
How to make the communication smooth?
- Choose the channel you want to communicate with and stick to it.
- Be innovative; For example many companies have started adopting TikTok-like video vlogs to make the teams feel more inclusive and interactive.
- Use video calls during team meetings or one-on-one meetings to increase facetime and make the conversation more impactful.
Avoid Team Burnout
In 2020, a study found that 69% of remote workers were challenged by burnout and disconnected from work.
And nearly 26% of remote workers felt socially isolated.
How to ensure this?
- Help employees take time off as needed to avoid mental fatigue.
- Keep sustained engagement to get feedback & check on burnout - Connect with the workforce through Tedx-style video talks in town-halls, team games, open mic sessions, etc.
- Help in setting work boundaries, virtual coffee breaks, recognizing good work, etc., to avoid burnout.
Build a Culture of Comfort & Wellness
Work from home has triggered many mental and emotional conversations.
Almost 76% reported experiencing at least one mental health symptom in the past year.
How to support your workforce?
- Adapt employee assistance programs, relaxation and meditation spaces, mental health assistance tools, etc., to increase wellness.
- Make counseling and clinical services available for employees. Provide health insurance with mental health benefits at zero or minimal cost.
- Invest in workplace mental health by accommodating more paid time off, mental health training, and cultivating healthy work practices.
Build cultural sensitivity
Global cross-cultural diversity is a big challenge.
Cultural sensitivity increases employer branding and indicates an inclusive organization that impacts several business areas.
How to build this?
- Include neutral and unbiased communication language. Normalize the use of pronouns to make all communities feel inclusive.
- Include diversity and inclusion training across leadership and the organization.
- Encourage employees to learn about other cultures, especially ones working in the same team, to sensitize them and accept identities other than your own.
Building remote management competencies
All 7 strategies mentioned previously are not one-time activities but behavioral traits. These traits need to be developed by building specific competencies within leaders, managers and individual contributors in the workforce as per their role and function.
How to equip the workforce with these competencies?
- Hire an expert organization with experience in remote management competencies to assess your workforce & identify gaps in your organization’s remote/hybrid model.
- Have customized learning programs designed to address the gaps highlighted in the assessment. The programs should be tuned to the role and individual.
- Deliver the programs through a multi-channel digital platform. Measure effectiveness of the programs through pre-defined KPIs.
Case Study - Prione(A Catamaran and Amazon venture)
Cohort:
Communicating Effectively and Delivering Performances in Remote Working
Objective:
Building communication & performance capabilities of Individual Contributors (ICs) and Team Managers to improve working remotely from home.
Approach:
Enparadigm created customized self-paced simulations for Prione to build a hybrid working capability journey. The multi-channel learning journeys for Prione focused on competencies relevant for ICs & team managers.
Participant Size:
25 to 30 ICs and Team Managers in each batch.
Competencies addressed
- Remote Productivity: Delivering while working remotely
- Digital Presence & Communication: Communicating for successful execution remotely
- Leading Remotely: Aligning teams and inspiring performance remotely
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Key Takeaways:
- Participants learnt how to use their social styles to benefit the groups.
- How to lead effective virtual meetings and communicate effectively to
engage the participants. - They learnt how to become more productive in a remote working
model.
Cohort:
Communicating Effectively and Delivering Performances in Remote Working
Overall Impact:
- 8.96/10 had clarity of learning objectives
- 9.23/10 achieved their end goals
- 9.08/10 increased their productivity and virtual meeting engagement
A few good words:
A deep dive into the social styles and how to have effective virtual meetings with the team at large... identifying various traits and using the thinking hats would definitely help to broaden the thought flow... - Ritesh
The learnings will be utilized on or before each Virtual or normal meetings. - Shameer Asif ME
This will help me to understand the social style of a person during a meeting. - Akash Mittal
To Sum Up
The pandemic set off a domino effect across industries, the major being the need to shift to a remote/hybrid work model. The challenges of remote working created the space for innovative approaches to help employees and employers balance their lives while keeping the organizational objectives in purview.
Effective remote team management requires development of specific competencies to develop & implement winning-strategies to empower employees to manage delivery timelines, prioritize their comfort and wellness, investments in productivity tools, and focus on diversity.
A sustained development program driven by an partner that specializes in remote-management competencies will fastrack the design & implementation of these strategies & increase their impact.
References
