Remote Workforce
00:00 The pandemic of 2020 impacted lives and businesses in a way we've never seen before. One of the biggest, most noticeable changes in people's everyday lives was easily the transition to remote working for some, this was a short-lived change.
00:16 Something that only lasted for a couple of months during mandatory lockdowns for others, it's become a new normal, but although many people don't realize it, remote working was already growing in popularity long before the events of 2020 many factors like traffic cost of living and commute times had
00:35 already caused a surge in remote working over the last several years. And of course, the rise of online businesses who thrive on being able to recruit skilled workers all over the world.
00:46 Also caused an explosion in this space, regardless of your reasons, for having a remote workforce. It's absolutely crucial that you understand how to manage this new aspect of your business
00:58 In the most effective and optimal way possible. And in this course, we're going to show you how to do exactly that
01:53 65% of post pandemic workers want to be full-time remote employees. 94% of employers are the same or more productive since they started working from home.
02:08 During the pandemic companies with a remote workforce, have the 25% lower employee turnover than those that are not. These statistics show that remote workforce is an increasingly important area that businesses should focus on.
02:29 Our course is going to consist of a series of critical discussion points. These are designed to cover this broad topic as thoroughly as possible to encourage growth in these vital areas and to facilitate a real and fruitful discussion within your organization about how you can each improve on this essential
02:50 characteristic, both at work and in your personal lives. In general, some of these will be pretty lengthy and some will be relatively straight forward and brief at the very end of this roadmap comes the most important final step discussion time do not skip this.
03:11 This is the most important part of this training. When you finish this course, you need to spend at least an hour or so.
03:19 Going over the questions we supply at the end as a group, whoever's the head honcho in the group should designate a facilitator whose responsibility it is that each question is covered.
03:31 And that everyone time permitting is able to have their say, make sure all contributions are valued. All suggestions considered and all opinions respected.
03:43 So let's move into the first discussion point, have daily check-ins since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies and businesses have opted to make the transition from an office to work remote setting.
04:00 Sadly, it's not as easy as it sinks working at home may seem to be the perfect job after all you're doing stuff in your comfort zone yet like any environment you'll likely experience some challenges from such a sudden transition.
04:17 One of which is the lack of physical supervision for supervisors. They worry that employees will not work as hard as efficiently compared to an office setting.
04:29 On the other hand, the lack of management and communication can greatly impact an employee's performance. Some even feel that managers are out of touch with their needs, which may lead them to feel neglected and overlooked.
04:43 The endless distractions at home can be a real challenge as well. Parenting responsibilities can be a really stressful task. As time goes by.
04:54 Others may feel the lingering effects of social isolation. The sudden transition also might lead others to face remote challenges, such as suboptimal workplaces and dealing with home demands.
05:08 All of these can bring high levels of stress and anxiety, having a great impact on their productivity. This is why daily check-ins are such a crucial part of remote work.
05:22 Managers should make an effort to establish a daily call with our employees. This could be a series of one-on-one calls for employees who work independently from each other, or group calls for highly collaborative work.
05:36 The key to effective daily check-ins is to maintain a regular schedule. This creates a culture of consistent, healthy communication for managers treat each call as a forum.
05:49 Let your employees know that your virtual door is always open, make the middies by showing them that you're willing. Listen, this will help them not to have second thoughts.
06:01 When opening up about their concerns, provide a variety of communication options. Unlike in an office setting emails alone or inadequate to relay information to your team.
06:17 As you begin your transition to having a remote workforce, you need to establish several communication options to reach out to everyone.
06:26 One of the best ways for communication, video conferencing, video conferencing is the closest thing.
06:33 You can get to have a real authentic conversation with your employees. When everybody sees everybody on a regular basis, it reduces the feeling of social isolation.
06:45 Video is also particularly useful to discuss complex or confidential information. As it feels more personal than a long email or audio call besides video conferencing apps, there are a handful of online collaborative tools that you can use to communicate with your team.
07:05 These apps are available on mobile and PC and are usually used for simpler, less formal conversations, as well as relaying information that can be discussed without calls.
07:18 Are you looking for ways to expand your communication with your team? Check out these essential tools that you can use to communicate remotely video conferencing, zoom, Skype, Cisco WebEx meetings, Microsoft teams, Google Hangouts, blue jeans, go-to meeting and Jabber instant messaging or team chat apps
:59:59 ,
07:45 Slack flip Chante twist,
07:49 Flock signal, and troop messenger. These apps are available via mobile or PC. So employees can have the option to answer calls on either gadget.
08:02 Having a variety of communication options helps create seamless communication, a streamlined workflow, better employee engagement, increased accountability, and most importantly, strengthened team relationships.
08:17 You can develop a healthy work environment by making the best use of these tools. Using such tools also promotes innovation and development, establish rules for communication, just like in an office setting, remote work will only become efficient.
08:39 If there are a certain set of rules to be followed, this is especially true. In terms of communication. Managers must set expectations for the ideal communication for their teams.
08:52 For instance, managers can establish a rule this daily check-ins video conferencing urgent. I am also if possible, let your employees know the best time to reach you during the day.
09:08 You can say something like I'm more available to take calls later in the day.
09:12 But if there's an emergency in the morning, kindly send me a text. This sets the expectations of your employees and helps them to be mindful of that schedule of others.
09:23 As you make your way to the transition managers should set these engagement rules immediately. Ideally, during the first video call, this sets the tone of what the communication would be moving forward.
09:36 Keeping everyone intact, create opportunities for virtual social interactions. Social interactions should have no limits. Physicians should strive to maintain social interaction while working remotely.
09:57 The simplest way to socialize is by catching up with your employees. For example, at the beginning of a Monday team call, you can say something like before we go into our daily check-in, we're going to spend a few minutes just catching up with each other.
10:12 How was your weekend? The next step of a remote social interaction is having online parties and team building activities.
10:21 If you're looking to plan your very first virtual gathering, here are some activities that you do. You can consider pizza party.
10:29 Everybody gets delivered a pizza at the time of the day. Video call care packages. One is sent in advance, a care package, and everyone gets to open and enjoy them at the same time, ugly sweater, contest, handout awards, like best DIY sweater, best team sweaters or ugly sweater of the year.
10:53 Spreads pixel art, create art using the spreadsheet software and make it a competition. Online team building bingo heaven, go board with a number of action items or accomplishment.
11:06 It's the pets channel have us channel where everyone gets to post a cute or funny picture or video of their pet though, doing these activities may seem artificial or forced.
11:19 You can never underestimate its positive effects, right? You're literally doing virtual activities. Like these helps reduce feelings of confinement and maintains workplace synergy provide the right equipment.
11:37 The effects of the pandemic have led a majority of employees to be unprepared for the sudden transition from office to remote work.
11:46 This means not having a dedicated workspace at home. Not only that others may not get how the or tools needed to communicate and continue their work virtually.
11:58 This is why a big investment is needed to provide your remote workforce with the right equipment for their home office needs.
12:06 If you're looking to create a checklist of the things you need to provide for your new remote team, here are the essentials workstation like a desk or a chair, dedicated business, telephone line, personal computer and accessories, like a webcam or a headset, a printer fast and stable internet connection
12:29 software like antivirus security or privacy communication and collaboration, filing cabinets or drawers, stationary and office supplies and company swag.
12:43 If necessary, dedicating a budget for these can be really expensive, not to mention the health and safety obligations that you already have for the workers yet.
12:55 Despite possible, financial setbacks, such sacrifices are needed to ensure that the business will continue to be up and running established team roles and responsibilities like any other workforce leader.
13:14 You should establish clear roles and responsibilities for some companies transitioning to remote work might lead them to make some changes to their employees' current roles functions.
13:26 Moreover, since then everyone's work is now created, discussed and transferred online. Additional responsibilities are needed to make sure that workflow will continue running smoothly via the, to do this managers.
13:42 It should start with well-defined job descriptions on remote day. One roles, responsibilities as well as the new processes should be clearly explained to avoid future conflicts.
13:55 If there are new roles or member changes, update the rest of the team immediately use project management software project management is now needed more than ever for your remote workforce.
14:13 The reason is that many employees might tend to slack off work as they can be distracted by other factors at home that may lead to mismanaging their work schedule to ensure that work is always done on time.
14:27 And the level of productivity is maintained. Companies should use centralized project management software. Here are some of the project management software that you can use with team a sauna monday.com, Smartsheet Reich work zone, JIRA, liquid planner, and Trello.
14:50 There are a handful of benefits of using project management software. First you create more and improved planning and scheduling. Second, unlike a corporate setting, the team can easily interact with employees from different departments resulting in better collaboration.
15:09 Third project management software offers cloud-based storage where users can make changes, leave feedback annotate, and more in real time. This also leads to easier file access and sharing thus ensuring project transparency.
15:27 Lastly, as the software allows you to see all projects at once it enhances team productivity, ensure work-life balance. A common misconception from managers is that they think that remote employees are generally more relaxed and can handle more load than an office environment.
15:51 On the other side of the spectrum, some employees feel that they should be more efficient at home and do more than they can normally handle.
15:59 In both cases. This leads to longer working hours. In fact, according to a study in 2019 by owl labs, more than half of remote employees work over 40 hours per week, such long hours will eventually wear themselves out.
16:17 Even worse. It can affect their health and lower job satisfaction. Managers should be keenly aware of this. How can they help maintain the work balance of their team?
16:28 Here are some practical suggestions, stick to a work schedule. This isn't always about getting work done. Sticking to a work schedule means ensuring that your team is taking their lunch and breaks on time regularly, review workloads review the allocation of duties of each member and analyze if everyone
16:52 actually has an achievable workload, familiarize herself with her tasks, it would also help if you talk to your teams regularly to see if they are overworked, all receiving the right amount of workload lead by example, there's no greater influence for your employees than managers and senior leaderships
:59:59 .
17:14 They should be the primary example of having a healthy work-life balance apply the PTO policy paid time off or PTO helps employees to take off some time from work while still receiving compensation.
17:31 This gives them the flexibility to take time off for personal matters, increased support for parents ensure that the moms and dads in your team are getting their work-life balance.
17:45 A practical way is by giving help to their childcare costs. Another way is by ensuring that benefits such as maternity, paternity or shared mental leave are provided.
17:57 You can also offer parents the option to work part time or participate in job shares, offer flexibility. A remote workforce should be a flexible workforce, although there's no harm in continuing the eight five routine increased productivity can be actually achieved by providing your employees flexible
18:22 work options. Why is that? So the main reason is that it helps workers align their work on their best men.
18:29 We'll state. For instance, if an employee is a morning person, they would rather prefer to start working on their tasks early the day for night hours, they find it much more convenient to finish their tasks late at night, giving them the flexibility to work during their peak hours, enables them to become
18:51 more efficient as they can perform better work in less time. Moreover flexible work arrangements can have a huge positive impact on your employees, health and welfare.
19:03 This will surely increase their productivity and morale. How can you offer flexible options to your workers? A good suggestion would be focusing more on productivity rather than hours, rather than monitoring.
19:18 If they completed an eight hour Workday focus on the completion of their tasks, although employees may need to work longer hours to complete bigger tasks, there will certainly be more days where they don't need to do a full eight hour day.
19:34 Another option would be flex time, which means having a standard number of working hours per day, but giving them a greater latitude to choose their particular hours of work.
19:45 As mentioned earlier, this would allow them to work during the times of the day where they are the most active get feedback frequently as your employees are transitioning to becoming a remote workforce, there would most definitely be some challenges along the way.
20:05 It could be technical problems such as their hardware or internet connection. It could also be a misunderstanding of roles and responsibilities or miss coordination of tasks.
20:16 Yet the most often overlooked problems are the personal ones, such as family problems and physical, mental, and emotional problems. This is why getting feedback from them is essential to determine the most practical steps you can do to help them however feedback isn't always about what's happening on
20:36 their side.
20:37 You can ask for raw candid feedback regarding the business itself. After all, there's always room for improvement, ask them if they have suggestions, improve a certain area of the business, or if they have concerns with the management, you can use team surveys or polls to know what's on their minds or
20:57 even better. You can request one on one feedback to have a better grasp of their thoughts and opinions regarding a subject matter measure.
21:10 Employee engagement, employee engagement is your employees' level of passion, loyalty, and commitment to your organization. It mustn't be confused with jobs satisfaction after all employees.
21:25 These are technically satisfied by collecting paychecks while doing very little work. Rather employee engagement focuses on performance. Measuring employee engagement is vital to determine what your organization needs to improve on.
21:42 How can you measure employee engagement of your remote workers, conduct regular surveys have regular employee engagement surveys to understand the current state of engagement in your organization.
21:56 As well as to understand the behaviors or feelings of each employee identify what's important to them ask their opinions on valuable topics, such as teamwork, trust, communication, pay recognition, and more these questions help organizations understand what sparks engagement so they can focus on improving
22:21 those areas. Perform a driver analysis, a driver identifies which drivers or factors have the biggest impact on engagement. The questions are usually rated from the scales between very unlikely, neutral, and very likely ranging from one to 10 host, occasional workplace focus groups generally used for
22:48 market research focus groups can also be conducted to gain employees' perspectives and opinions. You can use the quantitative and qualitative data to analyze which factors contribute to engage conduct exit interviews, employee we're moving on can give you practical and valuable feedback.
23:12 Most importantly, they can tell you what didn't work out for them. Their feedback can be one of the most honest responses you'll ever receive as an employer analyzed costs savings.
23:29 Generally, the, this the of having a remote workforce is the cost savings to maximize your savings. You must track the things that can lower your costs.
23:41 If you have more cash on hand and you can hire more people, reward your team more often or expand your company's benefits.
23:50 What are the types cost savings of having a remote workforce office space and commercial real estate? This depends on what percentage of staff work from home and the office.
24:03 For example, it's stick with the same office space while hiring more remote workers. But if you have an entirely remote workforce, you don't even need it.
24:14 Office employee health and wellness work tends to be healthier than an office environment. It also avoids most hazards found it, the setting local pay rates, hiring remote workers, particularly freelancers may differ from state to state or country to country.
24:38 Knowing how to pay accordingly can help you to both be fair and pay employees competitive, wait, vacation and sick time.
24:48 Remote workers usually use less paid time off, which means increased productivity. This probably stems from the extra hour that they save each day since they don't have to turnover and retention, engaged employees that become remote workers are high performers.
25:08 Higher retention will drive increased productivity throughout the business protect and secure company data. If overlooked, one of the biggest threats of remote work is the possible breach of company data.
25:28 Either by accident or on purpose. The risk of leaking confidential information is very serious for your organization itself can be at stake.
25:38 That is why one of the main priorities when building a remote workforce is to ensure that company data is safeguarded.
25:46 How can you ensure that company data is well protected? Here are four important ways. Number one, establish a cybersecurity policy.
25:57 The policy should state why it was established and the details outlining the security protocols that employees are expected to comply with.
26:07 Number two, ensure all internet connections are secure. It would be best for organizations to use a virtual private network or VPN to hide private information and encrypt internet traffic, number three, password and two factor authentication.
26:27 This adds another layer of protection to prevent data from being accessed by unauthorized individual. Number four, you cybersecurity software software were designed for security, such as antivirus firewalls and anti-malware should be installed on every employee's BC.
26:52 And now it's discussion time. The most important part of this training, whoever's the head honcho in the group should designate a facilitator whose responsibility it is that each of the questions you see on your screen is covered.
27:06 And that everyone time permitting is able to have their say, make sure all contributions are valued. All suggestions, all suggestions considered and all opinions respected.