How to keeps employees engaged and productive in a WFH scenario

Remote jobs or the work from home arrangement has been on the rise from a number of years now. But all these years since the job opportunities began to climb and the an increasing number of organizations also became more open to the idea of letting people enjoy the flexibility of working from home, the option to work remotely from home became a voluntary and welcoming one.

As opposed to that, what is going on today with COVID-19 has compelled people who are used to working from office to stay put at home and coordinate with their colleagues and managers for the work arrangements remotely over the internet.

It is on this given condition that employers need to take all measures to ensure that their workers do not feel demotivated or disturbed and enable remote working at scale. So, how do they do that?

Let’s look at some of the ways senior level managers in any organization can use to keep the motivation and engagement uninterrupted.

Resetting of goals

As with all the unplanned events, this one has also forced everyone – from organizations to their employees – to take a pause and start wondering how they are going to deal with this unexpected development that didn’t even give them a time to warm up, and this has affected the short- and long-term goal setting process. No one was mentally prepared for it, the outbreak happened and suddenly everyone found their objectives and key goals taking a hit. Organizations can set new deliverables for their employees for which the right tracking metrics can be put into place. The tools of the nature of Zoom, Slack and Skype have to be leveraged fully to get updates and ensure no one is veering off the company objectives.

Enhance teamwork on personal level

As touched upon earlier, the remote working culture has already made its way into the market. And this is meant there are a host of tools and applications for people to use in order to seamlessly engage and collaborate with their co-workers. But we’re not going to suggest only the likes of Zoom and Skype, what you also need to do additionally is employ ways to keep the engagement between the different individuals high even on a personal level. You can invest in virtual team activities like games, quizzes, and so on that helps workers bond with each other.

Encourage upskilling

The daily routine of office, where even after accomplishing a day’s work the employees are required for unproductive activities like some unnecessary meetings, some HR sessions that they can do without, or even some self-attracted distractions like a game of Foosball or Table Tennis, leaves no time to learn new skills or enhance the existing ones. In a world where we have platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and so on, you can as an employer purchase courses for your employees so that they can make the best of their work from home routine whenever there is time to spare.

Conclusion

While Covid-19 may have brought the world to its knees, organizations have a variety of options through which they can invest efforts to keep their workers engaged and productive.