According to Harvard Business Review, 40% of the 215 supervisors and managers who participated in their study expressed low self-confidence when asked about their ability to manage remote workers.
This can mean that there’s still a significant number of leaders who see managing employees working from home or implementing remote work as challenging. With the sudden impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, this reaction is common yet manageable.
As a manager, there are ways to equip yourself during these challenging times. Here’s an overview of the key elements of a work from home policy that you must implement to guide your team.
- General policy brief – Let your employees know the clear intent, purpose, and importance of your work from home policy. This allows them to set and manage expectations both from the organization and themselves.
- Compliance standards and measures – Managing employees working from home poses challenges in implementing compliance. You must be able to set or reinforce standards and measures on attendance, productivity, dress code, and others if deemed necessary.
- Availability of resources – Consider how your employees will be able to work from home in terms of equipment and tech support. These also play a huge role in their response measures and overall work performance.
Of course, there are more aspects to consider depending on your organizational setup and guidelines. What’s important is that you’re geared with the basics to get your WFH policy polished.
Moreover, managers must be able to ensure that employees working from home are engaged, productive, and effective. How? Read on for a work-from-home guide for managers!
How Managers Can Lead and Engage Employees While Working From Home
Managing employees working from home may be extremely challenging most especially when organizations have just recently adopted such practice due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since being able to work from home (or in some cases, almost anywhere) is already becoming a necessity, businesses need to adapt and prepare themselves to thrive. Zooming in on management, here are the best tips on how to manage employees working from home.
Establish an open communications plan.
In a time like this, employees expect more frequent updates. Be intentional and clear with rules and expectations within the team or organization to help build or maintain a working virtual office culture.
Also, make sure to empower employees to speak up in a manner that’s confident yet respectful; and encourage them to be open to healthy discourse!
Encourage continuous learning.
Share invites to webinars, courses, or training sessions offered outside your company. Or you can even organize your own training sessions for them to learn from.
Doing this doesn’t just help employees get more knowledge and skills but also makes them feel you care for them!
Make time for some fun!
Being mentally fit is as important as being physically fit. So, as a leader, you have to remind your team to take it one step at a time and you must initiate the practice of balancing work and play. Again, this can help you boost your working relationship with your team while caring for them!
Finally, realizing the importance of your role is crucial to succeeding in managing employees working from home. Aside from that, your ability to reinforce an effective system to deliver high-quality performance despite the setup has a great impact on your team and the organization as a whole. As Richard Teerlink says, “As a leader…your principal job is to create an operating environment where others can do great things.”
Need more management tips like this? Browse more of Bossjob’s blogs for additional remote working tips!
