5 Tips to adapt your business to remote work

For better or worse, work-from-home is here to stay, and now it’s up to businesses to learn how to adapt to the new working dynamics. Welcome back to our weekly blog, where today we’ll be going in-depth on a topic that is relevant to any business owner looking for ways to adapt to work from home or improve their current strategy. Before we get into it, we thought it’s important to mention that we understand that every company is different, which means not every tip might fit yours. Still, we did our best to find relevant tips able to fit most of them. With that little disclaimer out of the way, it’s time to go deep into today’s topic. Here are 5 tips to adapt your business to work-from-home (or anywhere, really) without having to go into panic mode in the attempt.

1. Devices Are The New Office

First and foremost, let’s talk about devices. Hardware equipment is pretty much the center of everything when it comes to adapting to remote work. They’re the new “office space” and the medium through which all of your company’s work will get done, so it’s fundamental that your workforce has access to proper tools. Although this probably entails preparing your budget to take quite a hit, especially if your business requires every single one of your devices to be high-performance. However, investing in new equipment does have many advantages, such as better and faster performance and connection thanks to 5G, as well as closing any risky links from your security networks.

2. Have a Strategy

The days of clean-cut working hours are basically gone now that you can’t actually enforce them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that stuff won’t get done. One of the first choices you’ll have to make is deciding how comfortable you are with asynchronous work. “Asynchronous’ ‘ basically means “at the same time”, so what you’re deciding on is how viable it is to have your employees working with loosely defined schedules. Is your company depending on getting stuff done as soon as possible? How many people does it actually take to complete the task? Can you trust your workforce to finish the work on time without supervision? These are questions that will help you make a decision, but there are a lot of different factors you should weigh in before you make it. For example, if a project needs a team of 4 to accomplish a task, you can set up regular meetings to get everyone on the same page, however, a zoom meeting won’t be as effective if you’re coordinating a big event with 20 other people. Real-time collaboration and conversations will always be the best option when you have to get things done in a hurry, which is why adaptation to remote work requires equal parts planning and follow up to do correctly. Another way to make sure your business stays productive is re-thinking the Project Manager position. Regardless of the size of your team, having an appointed manager to oversee workflow and make sure tasks get done when they need to be is a HUGE plus. It allows you to ensure results while also giving you the time (and peace of mind) to focus on your priorities, so when you’re coming up with your strategy, make sure to leave some space on your budget for Project Manager positions according to your needs.

3. Focus on Communication

There’s nothing in the virtual world that could ever replace the efficiency of physical presence. The immediateness and depth of live feedback will always be one of the most important factors when it comes to ensuring output quality, however, there are ways to keep those critical elements when you’re adapting to remote work. Business communication platforms such as Slack, Basecamp or Trello (among many others) can be game-changers when it comes to tracking and managing collaborative work, while also providing a channel for efficient collaboration for your employees. Now, there are different platforms for different purposes, and finding out which one suits your needs better should be a part of your adoption strategy, but providing a channel to allow quick communication between your teams should be one of your main priorities. To put it simply, if your employees can’t communicate, everything they do will be negatively impacted.

4. Feedback Is Better Than
Trial-and-Error

Since we’re on the subject of communication, we might as well go all in with it, which is why our third tip is keeping your ears open to your employees’ feedback. Analyzing numbers can provide you with useful information about results, projections, timeframes and such, but it won’t give you much of the human insights you need to improve your work methods. Perhaps the platform you chose is too complicated for your employees, or maybe it doesn’t have the features your team needs to actually get stuff done. Whatever it may be, you can find out about it early on by just asking your workers about their experience and listening to what they have to say. Listening to feedback can save you a great deal of money by avoiding repeating mistakes that you wouldn’t see unless you’d experience the day-to-day of a regular employee. User experience, connection issues, slow upload times, missing features, incompatibility with certain devices and many other problems can be addressed and corrected right away if you keep an open space for feedback, so be sure to take it into account when building your adaptation strategy.

5. Knowing What and How to Measure

As we briefly mentioned before, analyzing numbers can provide you with valuable insights about your company or your workers performance, however, new work dynamics also mean new Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Now that you can’t be physically managing how things get done, it’s important to objectively think about what’s important and what’s not. Does logging in early or logging in late really matter if you’re getting the results you need? Does it matter how long someone takes to accomplish a task if it gets done correctly on time? How would you feel, or think, about someone who logs in, late after hours, to put in some work? These are all important questions to consider when creating your strategy. Current work methods will hardly show positive results when measured with older standards, and yet, work output can still remain unchanged. You need to focus on the things that really matter: results. If you’re not getting the results you expect, ask for feedback to understand what’s failing, and once you do get the results you desire, make very sure to give credit to those who deserve it. Praising a job well done will help you maintain a positive environment for your teams, while also motivating them to keep up their efforts. These little rewards, although simple, can make a huge difference for your workers, and as such, should be kept in mind when measuring your KPI’s.There are many more tips and tricks to survive the adaptation to remote work, but unfortunately that’s all for this entry. However, if you want to find out about how we at Expertel can help your business make the jump to work-from-home a lot easier, get in touch with us by following this link to our contact page. We hope you found some useful information in today’s post, and we’ll see you in next week’s entry!