There are so many benefits to switching to working remotely such as the saving your business can make, as well as increased productivity, and putting less strain on the environment. However, before you choose to go remote as a company permanently, it’s essential that you consider the following factors. Read on to find out what they are.
Isolation
Loneliness is an issue that raises its head time and time again with home working. Rightfully so, too as employees are expected to go from working with constant company to none. Indeed, this transition can be hard for some people in particular, including those that are more extroverted, those that live alone, as well as those that struggle to socialize with others outside of the work environment.
Indeed, even the most introverted among us can start to feel the effects of isolation and loneliness when working from home permanently. The good news is there are some strategies you as a business can use to minimise isolation. The first is to embrace video calling for work-related communications. This means Zooming for meetings, 1-2-1s, and even coffee times.
Another tactic that can work well, is to encourage employees to set aside some time each day to leave their desks and get out of the house to work. Indeed, building this into the daily structure can help make this easier for them to follow through.
Last of all, consider offering free or discounted memberships to social spaces like gyms, so employees have a valid reason to get out and be with others during the day. Of course, the great thing is that by encouraging them to go to the gym, you can also raise morale and reduce sick days too, so everybody wins!
IT provision
Your IT provision is the foundation on which remote working will succeed or fail. What that means is it has to be robust right across the board from software to hardware to offering a secure, reliable internet connection.
The good news is there are some strategies you can use to ensure your employees get access to the best IT provision possible when working from home. The first is to handle purchasing of all the scattered aspects of IT provision in-house. For this to work successfully you will need an IT department, with someone always on call to deal with any issues that your employees encounter. Your IT department will also need to work closely with your accounting division to ensure they have the funds to be able to purchase and update equipment and software quickly, otherwise, it could seriously interfere with productivity. Not to mention the security risks you could run.
Another option to consider here is to use a managed service provider for your remote working IT needs. Now, you may well be asking the question: “what is a managed service provider?” and that’s OK. Indeed you can get a detailed breakdown and explanation on what a managed service provider is and the benefits you can access by using them by clicking on the previous link. Surface it to say for now, that one of the things an MSP can help you with is setting up your entire remote working system, as well as providing secure, and reliable connections, software, and even the support you need to help keep things running smoothly. Indeed, many businesses choose to work with an MSP for these reasons, and the fact that they bundle these services up together and offer them to you at a single reasonable cost.
Productivity and monitoring
One of the things that employees love the most about remote working is that they don’t have managers breathing down their neck all the time, Something that means they can experience more agency and autonomy in the work as well as less stress.
However, for managers, this lack of face-to-face supervision can at first seem like a nightmare! After all, one of their chief responsibilities is to make sure everyone else stays on task and meets their deadline, something that is infinitely harder to do from another location.
Unless that is, they may use productivity and monitoring software which allows managers and the rest of the team to see precisely where each person is in terms of progress, as well as who needs support and help to continue.
Indeed, many managers find that once they switch to using productivity software, their teams are better motivated, their workload is streamlined, and they can much more easily manage multiple projects at once, even when working remotely.
