Offering remote working in your organisation not only gives staff a sense of freedom but has been proven to increase workplace productivity. Whilst remote working can be advantageous for an organisation, there needs to be some planning and consideration for it to be fully effective. We are here to share with you some of our top tips on how to foster a positive remote working environment for both your staff and your business.
Great technology
Technology advancements have without a doubt been the biggest driver of the remote working revolution. From video calls, messengers, the cloud and collaborative platforms there are a host of ways workers can feel part of the action of the office. However, with this comes a bigger IT and security risk that businesses must address. To mitigate the risk of processing data over an unsecure home or coffee shop Wi-Fi, ensure that your staff’s laptops are connected over your VPN network. Equally, there is always a risk of a member of staff leaving their device on the train or being stolen. You can never be too prepared with data backups and preparations on how to disable remote machines.
Collaboration is key
As a remote worker, it can be easy to fall into the counterproductive trap of trying to do everything on your own. There are numerous tools on the marketplace that are great for collaborating with your team. Trello, Monday.com, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs and Asana are just a few worth mentioning. However, regardless of which tools you decide to use, it’s best practice to update consistently throughout the day. Management should encourage all users, remote or not to take up working on these platforms to maximise collaboration and ensure a consistent flow of communication. You are likely to find that your business will benefit overall.
Communication skills
When working remotely, communicating is key to maintaining trust from management and for remote workers to keep up with changes within the business. The communication onus can be wrongly put onto the remote worker, when in reality it’s a two-way relationship and needs to be matched with the office team too. The office team need to communicate meeting follow ups or other face to face decisions by email and sharing progress on key tasks. In addition to the collaboration tools mentioned already, another good tip to enhance communication is to block out your calendar with your work plans for the day. Again, if you and your team work really closely, you will find a huge value in a 10-minute call at the start and/or end of the day to go over workload and objectives.
Listen to your own working style
In the office you are more likely to be influenced by the working schedule of other people. Working remotely allows you to tune into your own energy or concentration levels throughout the day. Perhaps you’re a morning person, working at your most productive leading up to lunch. Or, you get that end of day buzz and enjoy a late power hour. You can maximise your productivity by arranging your workload to correspond to these energy points. High energy moments are great for powering through those big projects and low energy is perfect for ticking off those small niggling tasks.
Know when to log off
Any remote worker will tell you one of the things they didn’t expect to find with remote working was that they often don’t know when to call it a day. Physically getting up and leaving the office provides a cool off period between work and home and creates a divider between the two. We suggest working in one room in your home and not returning to it when work is done. Alternatively, going on a short walk around the block in the evening will give you that switch off time.
To conclude, remote working has proven to increase satisfaction and productivity for some employees. But, embracing this change is more than just signing off a work from home policy, it’s a companywide commitment to support this new way of working.
We hope you have found this article useful. Propman’s latest version has moved much of the product online, to support the evolution of property manager’s increasingly remote working schedules. So, if you want to find out more about X4.06 then get in touch.
