How SMBs can attain positive business outcomes from remote working
It’s barely 6 months into 2020 and COVID-19 has pushed more than half of the world into some form of lockdown. Businesses are losing revenue either due to shutdown or lack of customers. Travel restrictions and social distancing norms are forcing small and medium businesses to limit their operating hours and ask their staff to work remotely most of the time.
However, the remote work culture isn’t that bad as many companies have found it to be a savior in this pandemic. In fact, a good majority of small and medium businesses are now of the opinion that they can continue this mode of remote work even post the pandemic as it will reduce operational costs significantly.
Related Reading: How InfinCE Helps You Quickly Transit to Remote Working
So, the question on everyone’s mind now is “How can we manage the business efficiently during and after the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce?” Here are 4 tips to help you out:
1. Improve Communication
The most important aspect of maintaining relationships with your employees when they work remotely is communication. As employers, you need to facilitate a seamless communication experience for employees to interact with each other, share information, and foster a culture of continuous engagement.
Remote work collaboration platforms like InfinCE facilitate this by offering a seamless communication platform that allows employees to interact over a variety of channels such as instant messaging, video calls, video meeting conferences, and much more. By ensuring that employees have the means to communicate efficiently, you can assure consistent productivity levels while they are working remotely.
Related Reading: Why Is InfinCE A Better Choice For Safe Video Calling Than Zoom
2. Empower Collaboration
Most of the daily work done by your employees influence end customer service quality. It also requires the contributions from multiple teams working on different facets of a project or customer engagement. There needs to be a seamless collaboration mechanism that has to be in place to help employees easily connect with their peers, exchange information and files securely, set up meetings and discussions, manage projects virtually with diligence, and so on. To facilitate these activities, SMBs require a powerful virtual collaboration and enterprise management platform.
Related Reading: 5 Tips To Foster Team Collaboration In A Small Business Environment
Security is a prime essential when you choose a collaboration platform for your remote workforce since your employees need to handle sensitive customer information like financial data or social security credentials.
3. Promote Work-Life Balance
It is true that remote working was one of the most preferred ways to guarantee a healthy work-life balance for employees. But such a scenario wasn’t meant to be for such a long period of time and that too with almost everyone in the family also at home due to the pandemic induced lockdowns.
As employers, you need to understand that an employee may not be always capable of putting in their 100% concentration on their computers while at home. They may have to attend to their kids or spouse or parents periodically and engage in some quality family time. As such, you need to instruct managers to be strict on time commitments just for the sake of making it an 8- or 9-hour working day. Let employees take breaks in between and work in their comfort zones keeping in mind only the quality of the work they are engaged in. You will be amazed to find that employee engagement and productivity levels would improve under such a relaxed schedule.
4. Team Bonding
While it might take a while before everyone gets back to their old office regime and talk to friends and colleagues over a sip of coffee in the pantry, there are a lot of activities that companies can initiate over digital platforms to help improve team bonding when everyone works remotely. There could be weekly fun activities where teams can participate over video calls and they can even involve their families who might be around at home. There are several competitions that the HR team can run online, and employees can participate to remind themselves of the fun they had while at the office. In times like these, such positive motivational activities would be much appreciated by employees.
Related Reading: Effective Work From Home Tips – Infographic
Managing your business successfully during the COVID-19 pandemic with a remote workforce requires more than just interpersonal skills. A digital backbone is essential to ensure seamless communication and collaboration between your employees to ensure disruption-free customer service. This is where InfinCE can be your one-stop solution to managing your entire business operations remotely. Our cloud-based enterprise platform offers a host of features ranging from communication to collaboration to help enterprises build a sustainable workforce culture during the pandemic situation. Talk to our experts to learn more.
