With the outbreak of Covid-19, a vast number of organizations are struggling to maintain business continuity. A key component for success is keeping their workforces productive. A growing number of states have issued quarantines preventing employees from going to their normal workplaces. This has impacted organizations’ ability to continue delivering goods and services. Some, unfortunately, have had to lay off or furlough staff. For those organizations that are able to continue operations with remote workers, there is good news. We have already been making gains in expanding the use of remote workers. Prior to the outbreak of Covid-19, about 25% of the workforce was already working from home at least part of the time. Our challenge now is to quickly expand our use of remote workforces. Fortunately, there are specific, research-based steps that managers can take to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees, even when there is little time to prepare. 

Challenges Your Remote Workers Face

While addressing how to best utilize our staff remotely, it is important that we take a moment to understand the challenges they face. With the Covid-19 outbreak, most employees are first and foremost worried about their families’ health and safety. They are also worried about their job security and not being about to make ends meet. These concerns are having an impact on productivity. This in unavoidable. It is also temporary. Eventually, Covid-19 infections are going to decrease and while quarantines may last for some time, productivity will increase as the threat decreases.

Other challenges our remote employees face are the same ones that the 25% of the workforce already working from home have already found ways to minimize. Without connecting face-to-face with their supervisors and peers, remote workers often feel disconnected. This can lead to feelings of social isolation with fewer opportunities to connect. Information can be difficult to obtain causing frustration. Working from home there will be distractions in the background that cannot be avoided.

How You Can Support Your Remote Workers

While managing remote workers can be challenging, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Others have done this successfully focusing on four primary areas:

1. Building trust with employees
2. Establishing effective communications
3. Engaging employees
4. Using technology to support remote working

“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I’. They don’t think ‘I’. They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.'” -Peter Drucker, author of Managing for the Future.

Key to building trust is when managers keep their promises. Remote employees also require managers who trust them. Of course, trust is a two-way street and is maintained by both the manager and employee through active participation, open communication and delivering agreed-upon results. 

Managers should make sure remote workers are not left out by communicating frequently with staff. Keep in mind that people trust what is clear and distrust the ambiguous. Lack of clarity requires staff to either search out clarity or imagine the missing pieces of information. Don’t rely on your staffs’ imaginations to understand what is going on. Balance how you deliver information based on what information needs to be communicated to the entire team, groups of team members and individual staff. Keep in mind that some of your staff are going to be more comfortable with more contact while others prefer fewer interruptions. Feel free to adjust the frequency of communications based on individual needs.

Effective managers are quick to remind employees of the potency, meaning, and impact of their work. This contributes to employees feeling empowered and engaged. Employees should be given independence when possible while making sure they understand the interdependency of their work with others. Remote workers should also have the opportunity to engage with their coworkers and their manager. Engaged employees tend to be productive employees. 

From a technology perspective, there are a few bases that need to be covered. Employees need to have basic equipment such as a laptop, mobile phone, and possibly a printer. There also needs to be reliable access to the internet. Company specific information needs to be readily available and might reside on an intranet or perhaps in the cloud with Box.com, Dropbox, Google Docs or others. Collaboration tools such as company email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and/or WebEx should be considered.

For many managers, the prospect of managing remote workers feels daunting. Keep in mind that this is a normal response to any significant change. It is important to put things in perspective. The concept of remote working is not new and has been growing. We now face an opportunity to figure out how we can do some things differently. As we go forward, we will have a new increased flexibility that will be at our disposal for the future.