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How to Build Employee Relations While Working from Home

The COVID-19 pandemic has been completely changing the ways in which employees work, collaborate, and communicate.
Remote work had mostly been a way for businesses to offer more flexibility to their staff members. But now, it’s the only way some companies can stay in business.

These days are especially chaotic and difficult. To help you communicate and interact with your remote staff members, think about the following strategies for supporting worker relations.

Outline Clear Goals

According to studies, many people working remotely are more efficient than those working on-premises. However, this doesn’t happen on its own. Companies should establish clear and quantifiable expectations for their remote staff members.

With remote work, things can easily get lost in translation. Therefore, it’s essential to be clear about expectations and duties, especially if the pandemic has caused duties to change.

Keep In Touch

Holding periodic meetings is very important to help everybody stick to the same page and keep core business values in mind. This is particularly true for remote staff members who don’t have the chance to communicate with their supervisor or co-workers at the drop of a hat.

As remote teams are socially disconnected, supervisors who lead them also have to make themselves available. Regular check-ins with remote employees are a good way to support them and overcome issues that inevitably come up. Waiting around for employees to speak up about issues may lead to situations where it’s too late to take action. In fact, isolated employees are much less likely to raise issues themselves.

Get in the habit of asking your staff members how you can be more helpful when it comes to staying connected.

Encourage Sharing and Constructive Feedback

The sharing of knowledge among staff members is critical for both business success and worker development. For remote staff members, cultivating knowledge sharing is important as they may have fewer chances of exchanging knowledge than if they were co-located.

Regular constructive feedback between peers and supervisors is also critical to the success of remote teams. A culture that prioritizes healthy feedback helps both collaboration and communication. It also helps employees to learn from one another.
Although it’s often framed negatively, feedback is actually quite popular with employees, as surveys often show employees want daily or weekly feedback. Surveys also show that younger employees tend to want feedback more than older professionals.

One way to foster knowledge sharing and feedback is to implement a virtual rewards and recognition program that allows employees to recognize one another for their contributions.

Stick to a Few Collaboration Tools

Forced to build an entire remote learning model from scratch, many school districts during COVID have asked parents to download handfuls of apps for their children’s education – and have been mocked by frustrated parents for doing so.

The lesson for companies looking to empower their remote employees is to keep collaboration simple. Three, maybe four, collaboration platforms should be all your team needs to communicate, collaborate, and submit their work.

We Can Help Your Remote Team Achieve Success

At Career Concepts, we have been helping remote teams achieve success all throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Please contact us today to find out how we can help your remote team.

Blog published date

Jan 29, 2021
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