The pandemic outbreak in 2020 has promoted the practice of working from home. It got primarily implemented to help employees stay safe from virus contamination. Worldwide the pandemic outbreak has adversely impacted the business scenario. The continuous lockdowns and social distancing have made business and corporate owners close down their factories and offices. And the ones who remained functional had no other option but to continue work from home.
Guidelines by Gary Saitowitz on work from home
Not every business gets used to the work from home scenarios! It took some time for companies to cope up with this change. And currently, when offices and business set-ups are alternating between attending office and working from home, employees and business owners need a standard system to work from home correctly. Here are a few guidelines by Gary Saitowitz.
- Fixed working hours
Working from home often takes away the motivation and drive that employees experienced working in an office. Do you face the same with your employees? If yes, resolve the same by creating fixed hours of working. It means that employees need to log in and log out of their system within a specific time until other issues need their time and attention. Creating an intra-chat system for the office is essential to log in to it within the allotted time. It’s a good practice to maintain a system to mark employee work attendance.
- Task allocation
Are you experimenting with work from home on a selective basis? If yes, that means a part of your employees is attending the office as well. In such a situation, you need to address the task list correctly. Make sure that you allocate duties depending on the resources that are available with the employees. For instance, if an employee is making a business development presentation, they should have all the necessary data at home to get the job done. On the other hand, an attending office employee can take charge of the audits and further checks inside the office.
- Reward employees
The pandemic will often take away the zest and zeal that employees have towards work. To ensure it does dim off, have small rewards and accomplishment awards fixed. It will help the employees to pool in their best efforts and complete their tasks with enthusiasm. Share the names of employees who have done good work for the week or the month.
- Record the meetings online
Employees might need to refer to specific facts discussed during an internal meeting. It is a good practice to use a virtual meeting tool to record the audio or the entire conference. Make sure that you can also share the necessary pdf files as and when required. It will keep all the data handy for the employees to carry on work from home.
The concept of work from home has been in practice for a while now. However, it takes a specific discipline to opt-in for the same. To make do with the available resources at hand, you can follow the strategies mentioned above to streamline work from home practice for your business.