COVID-19 has become a scary global pandemic that has been sending shockwaves across all the countries for days. This outbreak has forced most of the countries to quarantine its citizens to contain its spread. As a result, all the businesses are experiencing drastic change and immense loss. Most of the businesses are operating remotely by encouraging their employees to work from home. However, teleworking or remote work policy has certain pitfalls, which may lead to a decrease in productivity.
Working from home puts an employee into his/her comfort zone, creates distractions, limits the ways to communicate with the co-workers and creates social isolation. To overcome these problems, a leader should explore innovative ways to collaborate and communicate.
Are you an entrepreneur who is following remote work policy and facing these issues? Don’t worry, to know more about how to increase team productivity, read below.
What are the best ways to increase team productivity while working from home?
1. Use of productive and tech tools
Equip your employees with all the latest and proper tools to help them stay connected while working from home. It is one of the most important methods to increase productivity and involvement of your employees.
If your employees are working on certain projects, including a project management application such as Airtable and Asana can help them work through multiple stages faster and efficiently. Chat/messaging and video conferencing applications such as Workplace or Google Hangouts eases communication.
With the use of these applications, your employees can be on the same page irrespective of how and from where they are working. These applications keep the employees connected, updated and productive even during this crucial time.
2. Arrange follow-ups everyday
Working from home can make the employees feel isolated, which will affect their performance. Also, you as a leader can no longer interact with your employees physically or chat or have a discussion about the progress of the business and projects. The above tools mentioned can come in handy to establish regular follow-up with your team members.
For instance, make a conference video call daily in the morning to check and monitor teamwork. You can also arrange an all-hands meeting in person every morning to get individual follow-ups. Revamping the meetings is not only one of the easiest ways to increase employee productivity but also an efficient one.
3. Motivate them to have dedicated workplace
Now that your employees are working from home, they may face difficulty in focusing on their work. While the change of workplace can boost productivity for some of the employees, a few may see a downfall in their productivity. To avoid this problem, you can encourage your employees to create a separate workspace at their home.
As every employee is locked in their homes for days or maybe even months, creating a temporary working space, say in a guest room, attic, balcony or basement is one of the best methods to increase productivity. By this method, you can keep their mind off from the communal distractions and focus on the given task.
4. Inspire to dress up
You may think, why force them to dress up when they are at home? Working in their regular pajamas and sweatpants can be a lot more comfortable and convenient for all! Undoubtedly it is but psychologically a person dressed well can think wisely and be productive.
Guide your team to dress up well and enlighten them as to how dressing up well can make one feel. Only if they feel good about themselves, they can focus, be productive and give their best at work. Also, dressing appropriately can make them feel comfortable and confident in cases of an impromptu video chat with co-workers or clients.
5. Support them both emotionally and workwise
Leaders should always lead their team to the path of success no matter how bad and unfamiliar the circumstances are. Be sure to provide all kinds of support that your employee needs to keep up the good work. We not only mean workwise but emotionally too. Remote working from home can be stressful and contribute to negative thoughts and loneliness.
As an employer, it is you who can boost and support them emotionally during this phase. Encourage your employees to have a calm mindset and focus on their work. Also, you need to be more active and available than ever when your employees are working remotely.
6. Keep the team together by non-work interaction
Your business can only be successful if your team is united and enjoys each other's company. An office environment allows the employees to do so and interact with each other over a cup of coffee, lunch, and breaks. Now that they are working from home, their interactions become limited or only work-related.
As a leader, you can have non-work related interactions with your team to keep them together. Just have a conference call and talk about the latest news, jokes or arrange virtual team-building exercises with your employees.
7. Appreciate their work
One of the many ways to increase employee productivity is to make him/her feel important. Appreciation is a great gesture to do this. Acknowledge them for the efforts they are putting in to keep the business going during this difficult phase.
Like we know, our employees are sitting at home with no proper technical support yet are managing their work efficiently. Every employee is striving to complete the given targets and tasks in time, so appreciation is the least we can do to encourage them.
8. Encourage the team to prioritize health with work
It sounds very basic but we all know how unorganized this communal and workspace can be when combined. Like we said, working from home has its own drawbacks and one among them is being lazy. Unlike the office, when employees do telework they tend to skip their meals or have it at unusual timings. Some even get glued to their desks for hours without any break. Encourage your team to take necessary breaks after every 3 to 4 hours and prioritize their health too. Also, advise them to stay home and keep regular updates on the latest news.
With these simple ways, you can keep your work and employees going. We don’t know when and how things will turn out for businesses in the coming days. Eventually, things will get back to normal but we don't know when. All we can do is adapt to this situation and never lose our focus. Keep our team united, work efficiently, be productive and find out ways on how to win over this catastrophic situation.
Penned By: Anuja Patil
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