The Covid-19 pandemic has taken the world by surprise and has caused many companies globally to shift to remote working. In fact, many are predicting that employees may not want to return to the office once the closures are lifted.
Some tech products are offering their tools for free, perhaps after using them in a crisis, you’ll continue to purchase their services.
Here in Aotearoa, even though we’ve done very well, we can’t fall behind when it comes to remote-working!
As a business owner, you may already be considering mandatory work-from-home policies. You may be worried about the infrastructure requirements and how to best support your staff in this stressful time.
There are a few things that you can do to ensure that you make the transition to remote working as pain-free as possible.
Communication
If you are used to being across the room from your team, communicating while remote can be a challenge. Managing a team remotely needs to be planned explicitly, for example, ad-hoc meetings are non-existent when you can’t yell across the room!
Tools such as Skype, Zoom, Slack and Teams make these casual interactions easier and can be set up to resemble the organisation of your teams to encourage widespread usage.
Consistency
Being consistent in what you expect from all staff means that they can devote their energy into the things that matter. Writing the expectations down makes it easier for everyone to coordinate the way that they work together.
Collaboration
Having a remote-first policy often means more autonomy for your team as well as a more collaborative approach to the tasks at hand. The distributed nature of your staff means that you are less likely (and may even be unable) to micro-manage.
Infrastructure
Is your infrastructure ready to be remote-first? Do you have an onsite server that needs to be accessed? Are your emails cloud-based? Are your files? Does your staff have reliable devices which they can use at home?
This last point is the easiest to fix. While you are planning your staff remote morning-tea, let us take care of the technical details for you.
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