Remote work, or working from home, is no longer an optional luxury — it’s now a necessity for most Singapore businesses. Given that this new remote working environment has been thrust upon us, it’s understandable that not every worker, or workplace, is ready for this transition.
The obvious negative flow-on effects are lower productivity from workers or teams who feel disconnected from their colleagues and work goals alike. With that in mind, remote work actually does boast many inherent advantages, that if leveraged properly, will boost productivity as well as satisfaction.
Let’s take a look at what you can do to keep your staff happy and engaged while they work from home during COVID-19.
1. Adjust Your Idea of Working Norms
The new paradigm of working from home may present some challenges for some employers and employees. As opposed to fighting the drift of working schedules, you can decide to instead embrace it, and let your staff discuss where physically and when they are most conducive and productive to work.
Some employees may now have family commitments during the day and prefer some flexibility in the working hours Or they might just be night owls preferring to start work later in the day and end the day later in the evenings.
As long as there is a predetermined time to regularly check in with each other, and they are getting their work done, you can embrace this new paradigm and let your staff have autonomy over their work schedule.
The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) actually encourages this flexibility in their Conditions of Employment report — they found that having flexible working hours were the biggest factor in reducing resignation rates.
2. Reduce Isolationism Through Community
As humans we thrive on personal interaction with real human beings — when that is suddenly taken away, the results can be astoundingly negative for staff satisfaction.The worst part is, it can often go ignored, as productivity is seen as the primary metric. However when looked at holistically, there is very seldom genuine productivity without happiness in one’s job.
We mentioned before that you should let your staff pick their hours — however we strongly encourage you to have a universal check in time every week or month where the team can catch up.
The explosion of popularity of conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams are a prime example of keeping teams engaged with each other. The focus of these catch ups, other than work — allowing your team to talk about life and family and the common struggles of COVID-19 are very healthy.
Keep the communal culture of your workplace alive, and you’ll find your team continues to rally to work towards common goals.
Read more on how to keep employees happy working from home in Singapore at Rikvin.com.
