Enforcing working from home discipline for employees during COVID19 pandemic has been a major challenge for some employers based on the feedback we have received across our social media channels.
Although, according to several reports, working from home can improve the productivity of employees by 77%. However, in the face of a pandemic the results might not be the same; but, to elucidate better productivity from your staff, there are certain measures you can put in place to ensure discipline and work ownership while working from home does not suffer. Let us take a look at tips to help enforce working from home discipline for your employees.
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Learn Their Challenges
As an employer, it’s often easy to forget that there are unspoken emotions and challenges that could affect your employee’s discipline when working from home. You might have provided palliatives like power and data to improve their ability but to your dismay, delivering on task is still a challenge and this might be caused my mental health crises and challenges with teams.
Have outlets and channels where employees can speak one-on-one or to a person on the team they trust would help them get through it; always reassure that you are here with them all the way.
Educate and Empower Them
Provide the educational and emotional support they need to work from home as well as deal with any challenges. Always address scary subjects like job loss, salaries and other benefit cuts because these questions would be on the minds of your employees and besides the scares of the Covid19 pandemic, this can also affect their job delivery.
Also share sessions on how to improve working from home productivity, relevant tools, educative videos and any other training or books that can help educate them on how to better manager themselves, their time and well as how to communicate with colleagues while working remotely. This is new to many and they are yet to develop such skills.
Focus On Results
Working from home grants employees the autonomy of their time and while it is important to encourage them to work within set time boundaries (to avoid job burnouts), ensure as an employer, to focus on results rather than activity.
Communicated expectations, deliverables and OKRs would help them focus on what matters most for the business and also creates a sense of accomplishments when these tasks, OKR or deliverable milestones are reached. As an employer, minimise micromanagement as this can be off-putting for your employees.
Encourage Over Communication
Encourage your employees to over-communicate when working from home, whether it’s for collaboration or not, it helps everyone keep abreast of projects and their progress. This also ensures that employees are not stuck on redundant tasks alone.
Over-communication also helps them track their progress as well as others’, builds trust, creates team bonding, builds empathy, improves productivity, creates a sense of achievement and promotes team building just like walking over the desk in an office situation.
Final Thoughts
At Jobberman, one of the things we have enforced and has helped employees is our weekly check-ins and productivity sessions via the video conferencing app Google Hangouts Meet both at the team level and company-wide. Since activating 100% working from home, we’ve had weekly learning sessions on Fridays and a 30 mins cafe hangout session every Wednesday where we chill and talk about the realities of work and the world we live in today. These activities, as well as Slack and WhatsApp channels, have also helped us bond further as colleagues.
These are challenging times and we hope these tips work and perhaps you need new talent on your team, we are all in this together and supporting you as well as other business across Nigeria with free job advertisement on our website for 3 months, take advantage of this to find the talent to help you thrive through COVID19 pandemic and beyond. #UnityInAdversity
