How To Make Work From Home Effective
Now that we have all had time to evaluate the pros and cons of allowing the team to work from home, most of us find it to be a mixed bag. On the one hand, technology allowed many businesses to continue operating during COVID, which would have been much more difficult without today’s tech tools.
But now that the pandemic is (mostly) in our rearview mirror, we are faced with the question of how to balance the benefits that work from home can bring with the potential downsides of having your team scattered across a virtual landscape.
Let’s take a look at how we can strike a happy medium.
Risks and Challenges of Remote Work
From the employer’s perspective, there are several potential downsides to letting the staff go virtual.
- Productivity: Many employees believe they can be highly productive at home. The primary arguments are that they have fewer distractions from their colleagues and can focus on the tasks at hand. The main problem with this argument is that, way too often, the task at hand ends up being getting the laundry done or catching up on their latest sitcom. Efforts to pull statistical studies together on remote workers is tough to do, but it is easy to see how virtual staff could take advantage of the lack of direct supervision and peer pressure.
- Cybersecurity: When everyone is working from the office, it is a fairly straightforward task for the IT team to manage the ongoing risks created by ransomware and phishing attacks. But keeping the company’s information safe and protected becomes exponentially more difficult when the staff is allowed to remote into the office. Employees won’t be the only ones trying to remote into the system, and if someone’s remote laptop gets compromised, it can quickly turn into a full cybersecurity breach.
- Team Cohesion: Virtual collaboration tools are getting better all the time, but they are nowhere near good enough to simulate the synergy that can happen when a team works on a problem together in the same physical space. We humans communicate using our words, our expressions, and our body language, and those last two are much more difficult to pick up on using today’s virtual meeting tools.
Potential Benefits of Remote Work
While there are a number of challenges with remote work, there are also many potential benefits.
- Flexibility: Not everyone’s home life is well suited to a 9-5 job, and not every job is suited to a 9-5 schedule. When employers take the time to structure a job in a way that the employee can do the work when it best suits them, they open the door to a large pool of talent that would otherwise not be eligible to join the team.
- Job Satisfaction: It’s no surprise that the option to work from home can increase job satisfaction, but it’s also true that full-time remote positions can be isolating and unfulfilling. Finding the right balance in your organization can lead to happy employees. And happy employees can often be very productive.
- Retention: It’s still true that most employees don’t leave bad jobs; they leave bad bosses. Still, having the option to work from home from time to time can be a deciding factor in whether an employee decides to stay or move on to the next opportunity.
If you plan to add work from home to your list of work modes, there are a few things you can do to help ensure the option works for both employer and employee:
- Set Clear Guidelines: Make sure your staff knows what is expected of them when they are working remotely. Guidance around their expected work hours, communication methods, and security protocols can help minimize frustration for you and your employees.
- Get The Right Tech: If you are going to let your employees use their personal equipment when they are working remotely, be sure that the device they purchase is up to the job. It’s a great idea to have the right cybersecurity in place on any computer that is connecting to the office network.
- Require Some In-Person Face Time: Structure your team’s time in a way that encourages some time where everyone gets together in person. Not only will this help them collaborate better on work tasks, it will also more than likely improve everyone’s sense of belonging and job satisfaction.
When structured correctly, giving employees the option to work remotely from time to time can increase job satisfaction, help with retention, and give people a change of pace in the work routine. As long as the proper guidelines and technical safeguards are put in place, it’s possible to keep your team productive when they are away from the office. Finding the sweet spot that balances the need of the business with the desires of the staff is often tricky, but putting in the effort to figure it out can pay huge dividends in the long run.
Are you struggling to make remote work function productively in your business? Feel free to schedule a free consultation with me and I’ll be happy to see what I can do to help.