Category: Hybrid/Remote

In a turn of events that could never have been predicted in March of 2020, more than 80% of employers now plan to allow their team members to work from home at least part of the time in perpetuity. While this is great news for most employees, 92% of whom want to work remotely anywhere from 1-3 days per month all the way up to 5 days per week, it represents a significant change from the old ways of doing things. Prior to the pandemic, 75% of workers had never worked from home so workplace culture revolved around the office. Accordingly, the question now becomes, how do you build workplace culture where there is no physical workplace?

Ultimately, the reality is that workplace culture was never actually about the office to begin with, so many of the same tactics that worked in the old world of work will work in the new one. The problem is that many organizations were looking to build workplace culture through ineffective mechanisms in the past, and having employees organically building real culture in the office is the only thing that saved them. Now that that safety net has been removed, companies will have to do a better job of actually taking the necessary steps to drive an authentic workplace culture, rather than simply defaulting to superficial efforts. In this article we’ve outlined some of the key strategies companies can employ to ensure a great employee experience no matter where team members work.

Why culture matters even more for remote workers

The pandemic has drastically altered circumstances for most employees, so for this post we looked back to 2019 for statistics on the aspects of remote work that are most challenging for employees who are not in the office. According to Buffer’s State of Remote Work 2019, the biggest challenge remote workers face is unplugging after work. Approximately 22% of respondents cited this as being a struggle, and a lot of this ties into culture. If there is an expectation to be ‘always on’, employee wellbeing and the bottom line will suffer. Findings suggest that the expectation to be working 24/7 makes workers 40% less productive, and 1/3 less engaged.

The next biggest bucket of what remote workers struggle with, at 19%, is loneliness. Loneliness has been estimated to shorten a person’s lifespan by 15 years, the same as smoking an entire pack of cigarettes every day. If your company culture only exists in the office for those team members who happen to be in that day, you’re risking severe health outcomes for your workforce. It’s crucial for the wellbeing of your hybrid and remote employees that you strive to transition your culture to support sufficient interactions to keep every worker socially engaged.

The last bucket is collaborating and/or communicating at 17%. While some of this comes down to what tools your company equips employees with and how they use them, it also draws back to your workplace culture in many respects. If your culture doesn’t prioritize collaboration/communication and discourages open and honest conversations, your remote workers will likely fall behind on projects as they’re kept out of the loop. Similarly, without strong connections between departments, your business units won’t be able to work as parts of a cohesive whole, especially with workers scattered across the globe, significantly limiting your company’s prospects of success.

4 keys to driving workplace culture no matter where employees work

Driving workplace culture without a workplace may seem like a counterintuitive concept for those accustomed to relying on happy hours and holiday parties to boost engagement. Luckily, culture actually has very little to do with events and much more to do with how your company treats employees and how employees treat one another. Below are four key tips for ensuring your workplace culture thrives in, out, and beyond the workplace, to support all employees.

1. Prioritize respect. Respect is a crucial component of workplace culture even if none of your employees work from home. Building respect into your all of your interactions and initiatives ensures that every employee will feel valued and appreciated. Nothing kills a workplace culture faster than people not feeling respected. This can come in many forms including respecting employees’ time by not sending unnecessary requests after hours, respecting employees’ effort by acknowledging them for a job well done, and respecting employees’ backgrounds and opinions by striving to build an inclusive environment. Train managers on respect to ensure this crucial component of a healthy workplace culture is modeled from the top, and incorporate it into your communication strategy by being transparent and consistent with employees at every opportunity.
2. Make space for whole people. Recognizing that your employees aren’t just drones there to do your company’s bidding will go a long way towards helping build a workplace culture that works for all employees, regardless of location or workspace. This includes ensuring employees are supported in their lives outside of work so they don’t have to spend business hours feeling anxious about things like healthcare, childcare, etc. Design your benefits package to meet employee needs so they can focus fully on their work during their scheduled hours. On that note, don’t expect employees to work around the clock, or saddle them with unmanageable responsibilities. Creating the conditions for employees to burn out is a surefire way to set your workplace culture up to fail, so be sure to manage expectations about when employees should be working and when it’s not urgent to answer right away. Enabling employees to make time for the other things in their lives will ensure they can give their all when they’re working and will help your culture soar.
3. Invest in making your values a reality. In addition to the items above, it’s also crucially important to practice what you preach. Without being in the office, it’s easy for employees to become disconnected from your company’s core values and lose attachment to the organization as a whole. It’s critical that you work to infuse your values throughout all projects and processes. Your company values are what binds your employees together as a team so if ‘everyone’s voice matters’ is one of your values, make sure that calls and meetings aren’t disadvantaging remote workers. If one meeting attendee is remote, consider requiring that the entire meeting be held virtually. Ensuring that your values are carried out in everything that you do will guarantee that your workplace culture translates seamlessly between all offices, whether home or corporate.
4. Keep employees connected. Last but certainly not least, employees are the driving force behind your workplace culture, whether or not they work in an office. If you don’t take steps to keep your employees engaged and connected with each other, your culture will be nonexistent at best, damagingly negative at worst. It’s crucial to give employees a dedicated way to stay connected and build camaraderie separate from all the work stress. Without a ‘water cooler’ space that spans across in-office and remote employees, your workplace culture won’t have a space to exist. Ensure that employees have a convenient way to build genuine connections with each other including exploring digital tools that can help.

Building a positive workplace culture is difficult enough as it is, and the transition to hybrid and remote work has only exacerbated those challenges. Rather than try to make up ground later on, it’s important that you prioritize your workplace culture from day one of your hybrid work setup. If you’re looking for tools to help ensure that you can fulfill the steps listed above and develop a thriving workplace culture for all employees whether on-site or remote, we hope you’ll give Workrowd a look. We’ve got a full suite of tools to build and support company culture for every employee, no matter their setup or schedule. Drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com.

Employee engagement has been a chronic issue in the talent world, and the challenge has only intensified now that many employees are working remotely. For at least two decades now, the percentage of employees who are considered engaged in their jobs has hovered around the 30% mark. At various points, this metric has budged a few points above or below, but in general it has remained largely unchanged despite extensive efforts and myriad employee engagement strategies designed to increase it.

During the pandemic, we finally saw some degree of movement as employers stepped up at the outset, driving engagement to a new high of 38%. As the racial injustice protests swelled, engagement dropped back down to 31%, only to rise again to a record peak of 40% in late June to mid-July 2020. Unfortunately, by September, it had dropped back down to just slightly above normal levels at 35%. Clearly traditional employee engagement strategies are only effective with a small subset of workers, but when employers make a concerted effort as they did in the early COVID-19 days, they can move the needle considerably. With many workforces transitioning to a hybrid model, it’s high time for some new approaches.

Why the new world of hybrid work requires a revamped approach to engagement

Employees’ expectations have shifted after more than a year of pandemic living. We’ve all been changed by this experience, and with new and different responsibilities on their plates, employees’ priorities have changed as well. That doesn’t mean that employee engagement can take a backseat though. Disengaged employees cost U.S. employers between $450 and $550 billion each year. Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability with 41% lower absenteeism and 59% less turnover. Businesses truly can’t afford to deprioritize employee engagement strategies.

Furthermore, the majority of employees want some say in where they work, meaning that for employers looking to attract and retain top talent, remote work in one form or another is here to stay. Deloitte found that 94% of the US professionals they interviewed believed they would benefit from having the option to work from home at least part of the time. Moreover, nearly one-third of employees say they would go so far as to quit their job if they weren’t allowed to continue working remotely. With just one in ten companies planning to require all employees to return to the office, the ascent of hybrid and fully remote workforces is assured. Accordingly, employers need to redesign their employee engagement strategies to accommodate this shift as soon as possible.

3 keys to building a hybrid workforce engagement strategy that drives impact

Employee engagement is a tricky issue, as evidenced by its immovability over the preceding twenty years. Adding to the challenge is the fact that not all employee engagement strategies will apply to all companies. In efforts to make this post as helpful as possible across different industries and situations, we’ve selected our top tips for ensuring you can keep employees engaged and productive no matter where they work:

1. Prioritize transparency and accessibility

• Provide all team members visibility into the full slate of employee programming you offer. Keeping everything within one system will promote inclusion by ensuring people don’t miss out on the initiatives that are relevant to them.

E.g. flyers in the lunchroom may have previously been a straightforward way to advertise an event, but now everything needs to be easily available via digital outlets.

• Deliver your programming through multiple channels to ensure equitable access. To the extent possible, all initiatives should be available to all employees, regardless of where they work. Consider making as many events as possible fully digital, in order to level the playing field between on-site and remote employees.

E.g. if you’re running an in-person event, make sure that there is also an option to dial-in to any presentation, and provide breakout rooms for folks who can’t attend in person to still get the benefits of interacting with colleagues.

2. Empower employees to lead

• Your employees know what they need to feel happy and engaged, so make sure you’re asking them early and often, and truly listening to what they say. This will pay off doubly in the engagement department, as your programming will be targeted directly to employee needs, and team members will feel heard and acknowledged.

E.g. conducting quarterly surveys to solicit employee input and identify gaps and/or opportunities for improvement in your programming will help ensure your efforts deliver results.

• Collecting employee feedback is a great first step, but there’s also an opportunity to let workers take the reins. Empowering employees to launch efforts that are important to them, from volunteering, to employee resource groups, to sports leagues and beyond, takes the burden off of People teams and shows your workers you trust and value them.

E.g. setting up a process for employees to apply to start an employee group or hold an event makes it easy to offer even more engaging programming with minimal additional overhead.

3. Ground your efforts in data

• We know that what gets measured gets managed, so why would you invest in employee engagement efforts without tracking outcomes? Make sure that you’re surveying employees after events and initiatives to see what they thought and how you can do better in the future, in addition to tracking interest and participation levels.

E.g. schedule short employee surveys to go out at the time events and trainings are set to end to collect just0in-time feedback.

• As we mentioned at the beginning of this section, there are a lot of factors that influence employee engagement, so it’s important to set up holistic tracking mechanisms that acknowledge intersectionality and capture a more complete picture. Understanding who is participating in what and how active they are, as well as measuring things like belonging and employee Net Promoter Score over time can help you see what’s going well and what needs some extra attention.

E.g. creating dashboards to track various metrics across the membership in different groups or programs can help you understand what you should be doing more of and/or who might be struggling.

If you’re looking for employee engagement strategies to drive impact for a hybrid workforce, we encourage you to check out our new infographic with stats and programming suggestions to help guide your planning. Some of the information in this post is included there as well so you can have one-stop shopping. On that note, if you want your employees to have one-stop access to all of your employee engagement and company culture initiatives to ensure transparency and access across a variety of locations, check out Workrowd’s platform. We make it easy to keep all your team members connected and thriving through our innovative platform oriented around employee communities. Visit us at workrowd.com or drop us a line at hello@workrowd.com.

With a shred of light beginning to show at the end of the COVID tunnel, many companies are concerned about how they will manage company culture not just for employees who will be returning to the office, but also for those who will remain at home. Company culture is impacted by a lot of different factors, and it incorporates many components across the continuum of the employee experience. While chat applications, video calls, and virtual events can all help to keep employees connected even while they’re distanced, those moments of informal communication or ‘water cooler conversations’ are often what team members miss the most.

Over the past several years, there’s been a significant shift towards aiming to deliver more and more elements of the employee experience ‘in the flow of work’. Josh Bersin coined the term in 2018 when he wrote about “Learning in the Flow of Work”. Streamlining the employee experience is undoubtedly important, but it doesn’t always provide space for the informal communication that is so crucial to driving employee happiness and belonging. As this is the first time many companies are dealing with remote and/or hybrid working on a wide scale, we’ve assembled some tips for enabling informal communication and connection for all employees, no matter where they’re based.

The crucial role that informal communication plays in company culture

Boston Consulting Group conducted a survey of 12,000 professionals across the U.S., Germany, and India last summer seeking to understand some of the early impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on employees. They found that respondents missed “being able to spontaneously walk to a coworker’s desk and discuss an issue” as well as “social gatherings at work”. In other words, they missed moments of informal communication. Interestingly, their level of satisfaction with their social connectedness with coworkers was highly correlated with their productivity when compared to before the COVID-driven transition to remote work. Employees who were satisfied with their social connectivity were 2-3 times more likely to report being as or more productive than before the switch to working from home.

In addition, both physical and mental health have suffered during the pandemic. Chatting with friends is scientifically proven to increase happiness, self-confidence, and self-worth, as well as reduce stress. It also helps to build resilience, belonging, and purpose. Employees can benefit from these improvements at all times, but especially now, when there is so much on everyone’s minds. Informal communication provides employees an opportunity to share their struggles and feel supported by a community of colleagues, without feeling that their comments may have an adverse effect on their career prospects.

How to foster informal communication for remote and flex work employees

In addition to the benefits listed above, opportunities for informal communication at work provide important time for cross-departmental relationship building, as well as the chance for junior employees to interact with and get to know more senior colleagues. It’s a crucial dynamic that makes employees feel more at home in and tied to your company, driving business outcomes like retention. Now that we’ve laid out all the reasons you need to cultivate moments of informality for all your employees, no matter where they work, let’s explore some strategies for doing so:

1. Coffee chats. Connecting employees for one-on-one or small group sessions where the goal is simply to chat and get to know each other can help set an expectation that it’s okay to engage socially. New and/or remote employees are particularly at risk of feeling that they have to be always on and can’t risk chatting or they’ll be presumed to be slacking off while they’re not physically at a desk in an office. Scheduling chats like these will also help to build stronger relationships across departments and teams, making the whole organization more cohesive and productive.
2. Drop-in rooms. Consider hosting a 24/7 conference room for which all employees are given credentials. The goal is to effectively provide a virtual water cooler space that employees can drop into to just take a breather. Historically, if employees had just finished a task or needed to step away from what they were working on for a moment, they could go to the kitchen or water cooler, and maybe encounter some colleagues along the way for a quick chat. Invite employees to treat the drop-in room in a similar fashion. While they will have to walk to their home kitchen to grab a drink first, they should feel free to bring it with them to the digital drop-in and enjoy it there with whomever else is in at the time.
3. Dedicated culture spaces. Many organizations have culture channels and groups all mixed in with their other virtual workspaces. While this violates the ‘in the flow of work’ goal, we would argue that it’s actually better to separate out your culture and engagement initiatives into a separate space. The goal here is to have a dedicated place where employees can engage with all the things they love about the company and their colleagues, without it being surrounded by all of the things they’re stressed about. Part of the beauty of water cooler moments is that they give employees a chance to step away from the onslaught of responsibilities. Additionally, this enhances transparency and access to these initiatives across the organization.

Creating opportunities for informal communication is critical for organizations looking to maintain and build upon company culture for all employees. While this may be a bit more difficult when it comes to team members who are remote either all or part of the time, there are still plenty of strategies you can undertake to include them. We’ve listed a few above, but consider surveying or gathering some of your employees to ask them what approaches would most appeal to them/be most effective.

If the idea of a dedicated digital culture space appeals to you, we encourage you to check out Workrowd’s platform. We centralize all of your engagement and culture initiatives in one place, making it easy for every employee to get involved in the programming that most interests them from day one. You can find us online, or email us directly at hello@workrowd.com.

Now that we are several months into the pandemic, many companies are looking to codify their whirlwind remote work implementations into policies that can serve them over the long-term. Unfortunately, for those organizations that did not previously have a working from home policy, it can be difficult to know where to start. There are many issues to take into account when assembling a comprehensive working from home policy, so we’ve dug into the research and summarized five of the most important below.

Why your organization urgently needs a remote work policy

According to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, the pandemic caused the U.S. to become a “working-from-home economy.” Late last year, prior to the pandemic, a survey by LinkedIn found that 82% of working professionals would like to work from home at least one day per week. At the time however, fewer than half of them were able to do so. Moreover, just 18% of people were fully remote.

By June though, Bloom notes that the percentage of people working from home full-time more than doubled to 42%. With 33% not working due to the crushing impact of the lockdown, and therefore just 26% working on business premises, the number of employees working from home is more than 60% greater than the number of those onsite. He furthermore writes that the working from home population now accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity.

With such high demand for work flexibility prior to the pandemic, and the smashing success of transitioning millions of people to full-time remote work overnight, it will be almost impossible for employers to revoke this privilege as they begin to return to the office. Accordingly, it’s critical that companies begin to put some formal infrastructure around what remote work will look like for their organizations over the long-term. Read on for suggestions of key issues to take into account.

Key issues to consider when assembling your working from home policy

Hopefully at this point it’s clear why you need a working from home policy. Just as policies are necessary for governing onsite employees, remote workers need support and guidance to help ensure they can succeed in their roles. When assembling your working from home policy, consider the following factors:

• Logistics. As with any other undertaking, designing a successful working from home policy should begin with the basics. Determine and clearly lay out who is allowed to work from home and how frequently. If the same rules do not apply to everyone, be sure to explain why. In addition, be explicit about how work will be tracked and evaluated, so employees aren’t met with any unexpected surprises. Lastly, ensure that you have tools in place to keep everyone looped into all necessary communications.
• Work environment. Many companies pump a great deal of money into optimizing their office environments and ensuring that employees have the furniture and equipment they need to be productive. The same should be true at home. Consider including a remote work stipend or similar as part of your new policy to help your employees equip their home offices as needed. In addition, once remote working is no longer necessary for public health reasons, your company may want to review and approve remote work setups over Zoom to ensure they meet your working standards and requirements.
• Data Security. Data security is always a concern when employees are working off-site. Ensure that you have clear policies for how data is to be stored, transmitted, and managed, both digitally and for hardcopies. Thoroughly train all your employees on the tools needed to keep your data safe, and put systems and checks in place to make certain that they’re being used effectively and appropriately. Don’t put your employees in a position to cause a data or security breach because you didn’t properly design, structure, and communicate your remote work policy.
• Compliance. There are more potential flags here than we can cover in this article, across fair labor laws, ADA requirements, and more. Suffice it to say that you should thoroughly research all the potential legal issues you may come across with remote workers, and address them in your policy. This is not an area where you can choose to be lax without the potential for serious consequences.
• Equality & Equity. Last, but certainly not least, it’s crucial that you keep a strong focus on both equality and equity when authoring your policy. To the extent possible, employees should be treated the same, or at least the same as others at their level and/or in their position. The remote working policy should consider every employee and strive to enable the most flexibility for every worker within your company’s particular constraints. In addition, be mindful of prioritizing equity as well. If some of your employees may not be able to afford the same level of work-from-home setup as their colleagues, consider increasing their stipend or providing company resources to help support them in getting their workspace up to par and ensuring that they are not disadvantaged compared to their peers.

There are many issues to consider when putting policies in place for long-term working from home. The list above highlights several of the most important ones, but be sure to consult your employees to confirm you’re covering all the necessary bases. Of course, in addition to policies, your remote work strategy should include plans for how to engage employees no matter where they work. If your company could use a streamlined tool for employee communications, engagement programming, and people analytics, check out Workrowd. We’d be happy to discuss how we can help make a hybrid or even an all-remote work model work for your business.

Many companies are now facing an unfamiliar talent and engagement landscape, with some employees having been let go, others moved to new roles, certain populations back in the office, while their peers continue to work remotely, etc. Navigating the increased complexity inherent in a hybrid workplace model is something HR departments, executives, and team leaders everywhere are grappling with in the midst of all of the other COVID-related disruptions. One additional ‘disruption’ is the increased focus on inclusion in recent months, following multiple high-profile incidents of racial injustice. Unfortunately, most organizations were already struggling to build and manage inclusion when the majority of their employees were in one place; how can they foster it now that employees are geographically distributed and having very different employee experiences?

The importance of prioritizing inclusion

These are important questions that every company should be asking right now. Building an inclusive workplace is undeniably the right course of action, for employees’ happiness, security, and wellbeing, but also for the company’s bottom line. A study by Deloitte found that as compared to their less inclusive competitors, organizations with inclusive cultures were:

• 2x more likely to meet or exceed their financial targets;
• 3x as likely to be high-performing;
• 6x more likely to be innovative and agile; and
• 8x more likely to achieve better business outcomes.

Moreover, Quantum Workplace noted that engagement is low for employees who believe inclusion in their organization is moderately or very weak, while it is high for those who believe inclusion is strong in their organization.

We’ve written extensively about engagement here before, but suffice it to say that it’s not something you want to overlook as it has far-reaching impacts across productivity, retention, happiness, and more. Particularly during this time when employees need support more than ever, it’s crucial to find strategies to build inclusion across your entire team, rather than letting silos crop up between remote and in-office employees. Below we’ve assembled some suggested tactics and approaches to managing engagement in a hybrid workplace model based on established best practices.

Strategies for building connection across remote and in-office employees

For your employees who are returning/have returned to the office, the new COVID accommodations may have made a previously comfortable environment feel foreign and unwelcoming. Respecting people’s different experiences with the virus and their individual efforts to protect themselves can make it difficult to connect with colleagues, even ones with whom they were previously friendly. In-office folx will need support and guidance to participate in building an inclusive workplace just as much as their remote peers who face more obvious inclusion challenges.

Some steps you can take to ensure everyone is included and feels that they belong as part of your hybrid workplace model are:

1. Level the playing field. If there are meetings where at least one person will be remote while others are in the office, require that everyone join via video conference. Having one employee trying to participate from a screen while all of their colleagues are together in one room puts that individual at a deep disadvantage. Conversely, requesting that everyone participate from their desks, no matter where they sit, ensures everyone’s voice matters equally and shows remote employees that they’re both valued and respected. This strategy has the bonus effect of further mitigating viral transmission risk by reducing the number of times employees gather in-person in an enclosed conference room, so it’s a win all around.
2. Open up communication channels. This may seem obvious, but there are a number of components to making this work. The first is to clearly describe which channels should be used for various types of communications, across email, chat apps, meetings, and so forth. Another is to encourage inclusive practices such as choosing to use chat rooms where project discussions are visible to everyone rather than one-to-one email threads that may exclude people and leave them in the dark. Third is to stress the importance of check-ins and ensure that managers are holding one-on-ones with all of their team members every week, along with at least one whole team meeting. For some teams, daily 15-20-minute video calls to touch base may be warranted to keep everyone looped in and engaged. Lastly, emphasize the importance of documenting conversations via digital means rather than relying on in-person conversations that don’t include the entire team, especially for the sake of remote workers.
3. Develop a buddy system. Find ways to promote interaction for both in-office and remote workers. There are apps that pair up random employees for get-to-know you chats, programs that will help you launch a mentoring program, and as always, our personal favorite, employee resource groups. Create social infrastructure for your employees to interact across distances and you’ll reap the benefits.

The requirements of our new virus-ridden reality can make it difficult to keep your workforce engaged and connected. As you design your strategy for the coming months, make sure you’re catering to both employees who work in the office and their colleagues who are remaining remote. If you’re looking for an all-in-one solution to help keep employees on the same page across project teams, employee groups, and the organization more broadly, give us a shout at hello@workrowd.com. We’d love to show you how we can streamline the complications a hybrid workforce brings and increase engagement and inclusion for your team.

The urgency of the pandemic forced many companies to transition to fully remote work on an unprecedented schedule. Rather than the years-long strategy and contract negotiations most organizations go through in preparation for such a monumental shift, we instead saw timelines of weeks, or even days. This scramble meant that leaders had to make product and equipment decisions on the fly, without the usual due diligence they would conduct to ensure success. While this of course taught us in some regard that those lengthy timelines may not be entirely necessary, it also makes a case for companies stepping back in the coming months to evaluate whether they actually have the right tools to support remote teams.

While many of the tools your company is already using can be repurposed for remote/partially remote teams, it’s important to keep in mind that remote employees have different needs from those in the office. Your clunky intranet from 2010 may no longer be sufficient to keep your team engaged and connected when they don’t have day-to-day interactions to sustain them, or a colleague at the next desk over to ask where a certain form can be found. Similarly, your digital environment may not be optimized to enable the communication and collaboration necessary for your teams to thrive under increasingly virtual conditions.

We know everyone is juggling a seemingly infinite list of deliverables right now, so we took some time to summarize the key functionalities that should be included in everyone’s ecosystem of tools for remote teams. The list is organized by employee need, with potential solutions outlined within the description. While every workplace is different and this list excludes tools that aren’t specifically related to remote work, we hope that it can serve as a helpful jumping-off point:

• Easy communication: Chat apps have become widespread across a number of industries to facilitate easy communication between team members. With remote work, staying in touch by way of digital systems has become an imperative. There are myriad chat applications on the market today, each with its own pros and cons, but a quick, text-based tool to connect your employees and enable seamless communication is a must-have to help people do their work and stay engaged with each other.
• Face-to-face time: While catching up with a colleague in the hallway or kitchen used to be a surefire way to stay connected with coworkers, the transition to working from home has put a full stop to all in-person fraternizing. Your team still needs to see each other, though. They also need to be able to connect virtually with clients, partners, and more, so make sure that whatever system you implemented or scaled on the fly is built for the long haul. Remote work is here to stay so your company needs robust video conferencing software to help everyone thrive.
• Streamlined file access and management: Studies show that the average employee spends 1-2.5 hours per day looking for information they need. Over the course of the week, this can add up to an entire wasted day. Without desk neighbors to ask for help, and with new ways of working to navigate, remote employees need streamlined access to company files and straightforward policies and processes for how to manage and share documents they create. Ensure that your team has an easy-to-navigate central repository of folders, and user-friendly software to save and provide access to their documents.
• Simple scheduling: We can no longer pop over to a colleague’s desk to ask how their weekend was and see if they can join our 2pm meeting. Similarly, with so many outside responsibilities encroaching on the workday with children home from school and the need to try to shop at less crowded times, people’s calendars are wonkier than ever. Save everyone the email spam involved in trying to schedule group meetings by enabling easy calendaring and sharing access. Functional calendaring software will not only help your employees manage their appointments, but will help them loop in teammates to keep everyone on the same page.
• Flexible collaboration tools: No matter the business you’re in, it’s highly likely that your success depends on a great deal of team collaboration. At the very least, ensure that you have screen-sharing capabilities to help your team communicate more easily and effectively. In addition, many companies use a variety of note-taking, simultaneous editing, and real-time feedback tools to help their team effectively collaborate at a distance.
• Project transparency: Keeping everyone aligned and on track with where a project is now, where it needs to go, how it’s going to get there, and who will be involved when is one of the most critical needs for remote teams. With everyone working in the silos of their own homes, it can be difficult to move projects forward when they require a lot of different pieces from a lot of different people. Whether it’s project management software, daily reporting apps to track who completed what, or something specific to your company’s industry, every team needs a solid plan and product(s) to provide transparency to everyone working on a project.
• Advanced security: With everyone working from home, it can be difficult to keep all of your company’s information and accounts secure. Now that we have more time to build out the infrastructure for working remotely, confirm that your company has all of the necessary security tools in place, from password managers to remote desktops, to protect your organization from a data breach.
• Community: Last but certainly not least, your employees need each other. Whether you organize events and initiatives through your chat and video call systems, plan trips for your remote employees to meet once we’re able to gather again, step up your public recognition programs, or something original that you think up, it’s imperative that you find ways to help your team build community and support networks.

As always, the best way to assess what tools your remote teams need is to simply ask them. If you’re looking for a tool that incorporates many of the needs covered in this post and provides you analytics on your people, come see us at workrowd.com. We’d love to chat about your needs, and share some of what we’ve learned about keeping employees connected. You can also reach us at hello@workrowd.com.

We can all agree that the past month has been tough. The pandemic has unsurprisingly brought with it a great deal of pain, sadness, frustration, confusion, and a whole host of other negative emotions and experiences. Whether it’s our standard routines, our economic security, our friends and family, or just the ability to freely walk outside, we’ve all lost a great deal as part of this crisis. Everyone is grappling with new, uncomfortable, and often frightening circumstances, and it’s bound to take a toll on employees’ productivity.

While there are no easy solutions here, one simple way to help incrementally lighten the emotional burden on your team is to intentionally build positive moments into the remote work day. Studies have shown that people who watch a funny video clip before starting a task are 10% more productive than peers who did not watch the clip, so now is not the time to keep those cat videos to yourself. Many employees are struggling with a newly full house, upended schedules, the constant threat of illness, escalating cabin fever, etc.; creating opportunities for stress relief is essential. Accordingly, today we’re writing with some suggestions for helping your employees stay sane and engaged during these highly destabilizing times.

As we’ve noted in prior posts, one of the most important steps you can take to support employees right now is to encourage connection during check-ins and other meetings. Going one step further, providing opportunities for laughter can be transformative for your team members staring down another month or more of social distancing. While casual conversation will not be appropriate for every call, making time to share funny stories from people’s quarantine chaos can not only help your team blow off some steam, but will also help bring them closer together. Finding common ground and cultivating understanding is one of the most significant gifts we can give to each other today (and every day). Amidst the strain of ‘normal’ life under these new restrictions, the brief respite of just chatting with colleagues can be a critical line of defense against burnout.

If you want to expand the conversation outside of meetings, consider using your company’s communication channels to launch a daily or weekly question to get employees chatting. It could be as straightforward as joining the twitter trend of sharing pictures of your new ‘coworkers’ (i.e. pets, kids, plants, etc.), or something more related to your business such as strangest customer stories, most interesting place you’ve visited while wearing company swag, etc. Even simply prompting employees to share the books they’re reading and TV shows they’re watching to pass the time can help brighten people’s remote work days and improve their mental health.

Another way to approach this task is to plan events for employees. While we know that virtual events are not ideal, continuing to plan programming for your team and even for their families remains critically important to boost flagging morale. Some companies have organized times for employees’ children to read to each other. Others are planning virtual coffee breaks and/or happy hours. You could even schedule yoga, cooking, strength training, or other well-being sessions for your employees to join. Building in these opportunities for positivity will not only help your team members focus during remote work hours, but will make them happier all around during this difficult time.

Yet another way to surprise and delight employees is with gifts and food. While not the easiest to orchestrate with many stores closed down and deliveries slowed, assembling care packages or ordering food to be delivered to your employees can create much-needed bright spots amidst the monotony of staying home all the time. Some companies have arranged for their team members to receive pizza or baked goods, while others have created thoughtful gifts to distribute to make working at home a bit easier. These kits can include items such as headphones/headsets, hand sanitizer, ergonomic seat cushions, tea/coffee, mugs, snacks, etc. You could also offer free subscriptions for exercise classes, meditation apps, or similar services so employees can more easily build stress relief into their schedules.

There are many options to support employees during this crisis, but the best way to do so within your company is to ask your people what they need. While some may be too overwhelmed to know right now, just the fact that you checked in and showed that you’re available and open to listening to their requests will be a step in the right direction. As always, if there’s any way we can help, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hello@workrowd.com.