This pandemic has presented a lot of challenges for businesses and workplaces. It has also caused a shift in how we work, with more employees working from home than ever before. This presents new challenges as a manager to lead your team and achieve the goals of the company. Our How to Guide will provide some great tips on managing employees remotely, ensuring the distance between you and your team won’t negatively impact your performance.
Create a similar working experience
Now that more people are working from home, how you interact with your team will change. Remote working can make employees feel isolated and unsupported. It is important to ensure that staff still feel that they have the same support that they would receive had they been in the office.
Still provide the same assistance, training opportunities and regular catch ups with your junior staff that you would normally provide pre-pandemic. If you need to have more zoom calls to answer questions, brainstorm or solve problems then it needs to be done.
Onboarding a new employee
Remote working may have made onboarding new employees one of the most complicated aspects of management. The pandemic has not stopped businesses from hiring new talent so you must create a program that will effectively help them to be a new member of your team as they work from home.
Bringing new employees into the office on their first day may not be possible. To ensure your new employee has everything to be onboarded, a program that can effectively communicate what is needed to perform their role is a must. Create a list of the software and accounts that need to be set up and provide resources so that they perform these tasks. If you are planning to provide equipment such as laptops, couriers may be required.
The isolation of working from home presents some challenges that can really affect how the new employees feel about working for your business. It is key that they feel welcome and a part of your team.
This is difficult to create when we are not able to interact face to face. To overcome this, create social events either digitally or outside of the office so you can help them to build professional relationships and friendships within the team.
Create avenues for feedback
This new working environment is new for everyone and not everything will be perfect on the first try. Feedback from your team will play a big role in working out where communication is breaking down and goals aren’t being achieved. Activities such as regular catch ups, suggestion boxes or message groups are a great way for people to communicate any issues they may be experiencing.
As a manager, you should always approach this feedback with an open mind, be empathetic and lead from the front. This will help staff feel like they can approach you with any of their issues.
This pandemic has presented new challenges with remote working. Leading from the front and working with your team to overcome these challenges will not only create better solutions but it helps you all to tackle the next problem that comes along.
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