COVID-19 CRISIS MANAGEMENT FOR SMES BLOG #2
How to enable your team to be effective and motivated while working from home
Since the outbreak of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, more than 600,000 people around the world have become infected (As of date- March 29, 2020).
Business owners around the globe are playing a critical role in containing this very contagious disease as decisions taken by them not only affect the direct stakeholders but their families and friends.
We know from the experience of other countries like China and South Korea that practicing social distancing and closing workplaces helps limit the spread of the virus, meaning less people will get sick. That’s because the virus is spread from person to person contact, which is difficult to avoid in a closed space like a workplace.
The number of coronavirus or COVID-19 cases of worldwide up to 30 March 2020 | Credit: Lancet Inf Dis Article: Here.
The answer? Remote working
Source: Pixabay
Remote working: what it is, why and what it means for your business
To keep staff safe and avoid the coronavirus spreading, businesses can enable their staff to work remotely from their homes. Remote working means businesses cannot operate as usual, which can bring new challenges.
So how can we business owners and managers overcome these challenges?
In this post, we cover the 3 biggest remote working challenges and how to overcome them.
Source: Career Karma
Adapting your business practices to the COVID-19 world
Firstly, if you haven’t closed your workplace and sent your team home yet, we strongly encourage you to do so as soon as possible. This is a responsible measure to limit the spread of the virus amongst the many communities that your staff are part of.
While we in the business world are used to conducting in-person meetings, these must now be replaced with telephone or video conferences. Practices will change for your staff too, for example staff who record and track their daily tasks need to replace their familiar paper notebooks with online tracking tools.
Challenge 1: Managing communications
When your team is working from many different places, it’s difficult to ensure effectiveness in communications. Staff can also experience feelings of isolation and distance from management which can lead to frustration. This frustration can mean staff disengage and become demotivated, so is something best avoided.
Challenge 2: Is anybody out there?
In 2019, renowned digital media company Buffer conducted research on remote working and made some startling discoveries. Their researchers asked 2,500 remote workers about the benefits and challenges of remote working.
Close to 20% of the workers reported that loneliness was a huge challenge. Regarding the advantages of working from home, 40% said that the biggest one is the flexible schedule. Below, a graph with the reasons of the benefits perceived by people working remotely:
Remote working requires a completely different mindset to what is required in a conventional workplace. As business owners and managers, we need to acknowledge the anxiety and isolation it can generate by implementing systems and processes to overcome these challenges.
2. Solution: Face to face is always better!
Source: GSuite
When it comes to communications, it’s really important to set up tools and methods for collaboration. While in person meetings might feel like the real thing, you can still conduct meetings effectively and in a way that feels like the real thing, even if you don’t shake hands, (or sampeah) or take your seat at the boardroom table. Many of these involve video functionality, and together are called video conferencing.
Our video conferencing recommendation is Google’s Hangouts Meet feature. As the name suggests, it enables people to meet. It’s lightweight, fast and integrated into Google, which many businesses already use for daily operations. Just schedule a meeting via Google Calendar and the Google Hangouts Chat link is already provided - attendees just need to click on the link to start or join the meeting.
We also suggest Trello for project management:
Source: Trello - Youtube
Trello is, at its core, an online corkboard. You use it to organize “cards” into lists—those cards can be tasks, notes, projects, shared files, or anything else that helps your team work together. It’s based on a simple idea: for effective project management, you need full visibility over all relevant tasks and flexibility to rearrange them as your priorities change.
Find more about Trello here.
Challenge 3: The “I can’t concentrate” feeling
Source: https://myofficein.ph/
Under normal circumstances, home is a place of rest and relaxation. It’s difficult to shake those associations. The best way to start re-defining home as your workplace is to choose a place inside the house where you can focus.
For you and your staff to avoid the “I can’t concentrate” feeling, a strict every-day routine can help form the new association. The routine can be as simple as 5 minutes of yoga or stretching before you sit down to work, or setting a time in the afternoon to get a refreshing snack. The important thing is to make it enriching and to make it part of your working day.
Tip: Keep it neat!
Keeping your workspace neat is important. According to an article written by job management specialist Timestead, “neat workplaces increase employees’ morale and transform the space into a cleaner, safer, healthier, happier work environment”.
Challenge 4. Employees are not motivated
Source: Getty
When you’re so far from staff, it can feel tough to keep team morale high. But there are 3 things you can do to make sure staff keep motivated.
Source: GetApp
Schedule –> Creating a schedule that captures work and non-work activities can help your workers have a routine. If the agenda is shared with all the team, everyone can align. We recommend T-metric for time tracking your schedule, you can also synchronize it with google calendar.
TMetric is a time tracking app that helps streamlining your growing business for higher profits, satisfied clients and happy teams. Simple time tracking extension which helps you be more productive, complete projects in time and bill your clients correctly. Find more about T-metric here.
Organize internal training sessions and suggest your team online courses. Our current favourite e-learning platform is Linkedin learning.
Source: LinkedIn Learning
3. Final thoughts
Remote working is a necessary part of life in our COVID-19 world. To not do it is to enable the spread of the virus, with negative consequences for your staff and their families. Remote working can mean challenges in communication, lack of concentration and even motivation, all of which are bad for business.
Businesses can solve these challenges by implementing systems and processes, recommending schedules and training staff to support them through this difficult time.
Remember that your team is your biggest business asset!
For vetted information on COVID 19 and how to practice social distancing (which we will cover more of soon), please visit Flatten the Curve for more information.
Did we miss something? Have a burning question about how to manage during COVID-19? We’re here to help! Comment below or send us a direct message for business consultation and support.