How To Effectively Manage Your Staff At Home
In these unprecedented circumstances its highly likely your staff are working from home if they are working at all. On the surface this seems like a great idea right? But what happens if it all goes wrong?
The truth is, if you don’t know how to effectively manage your employees while they work from home they could start to:
- Feel isolated and detached from the team or business
- Slack off
- Miss key calls
- Drop the ball on even the most basic if tasks
You need to consider a number of key areas to enable you to stand a chance of getting the best out of this situation.
Set out expectations
Chances are unless your business had people that worked from home prior to lockdown, your business will not have had a policy to outline the businesses expectations to home workers. Now is the time to get this done and ask all staff working from home to sign it. It should cover everything from response times in relation to calls and emails to the work they are expected to complete.
Keep In Touch
The key to managing employees that work from home is solid communication. Just because you are not all in the office doesn’t mean you cant have your daily briefing or weekly meeting. Send out email invitations to these calls or Zooms, etc and ask people to block out time in their diary.
If you have a large workforce it may be worth looking at a clocking in and out policy. There are a number of apps or software options you can utilise to help you do this.
The last thing any employer wants is for the staff to feel more isolated than we all essentially are right now and I have seen some really creative ideas of late to stay in touch; Friday winge and wine Zoom being one, where all the staff come together at the end of the day on Friday with a glass of wine to celebrate the completion of another tough week in lockdown.
Now is a testing time for any business and employer. However, those that embrace it could well be paving the way for a new future. Those businesses who said they couldn’t offer flexible or home working historically are now seeing some of the benefits of doing so, and will undoubtedly look at incorporating it into the business when things return to some form of normality. What better way to empower your staff by showing them you trust them enough to allow them to work from home?
If you feel, as a business, that you have been forced into this situation but you can see the benefits, I would suggest you perhaps engage with someone that can help you set this up effectively going forward. We can recommend a few people depending where you are based. We can also help you structure your workforce effectively be it in the office or at home.
Give us a call today for a free, no obligation review and let’s see if we can not only make your recruitment methods more cost effective but also provide better results.
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