We have learned a lot about remote working in the last 2 years. It was forced upon us in order to protect public health; but at that time, we found that many people enjoyed the new work arrangement. Many workers have cited an increase in productivity and job satisfaction since they began working from home. One company, TechQuarters, an IT support provider London businesses rely on, found that they were able to streamline their organization and make themselves more effective by getting rid of their offices entirely.
If you think that remote working sounds like a good fit for your organization, you’ll probably be wondering how to implement it successfully. Below are some of the steps that you need to follow in order to successfully roll out remote working.
- Gather Feedback / Consensus
First thing’s first, you need to discuss remote working with your organization. Before making a decision, gather feedback from everyone in the business to find a consensus on the idea of working remotely.
You can do this by holding a meeting about remote work – what your vision is for implementing it in the company; who is in favor of it; who has reservations and why. For example, TechQuarters did this when they went remote due to Covid-19. They found that the outsourced IT support London businesses get from them did not require them to have an office, and they also found that their employees were happy to continue.
- Define Goals & Expectations
Just as it is important for you to know what your employees are thinking about with regards to remote work, it is also important for them to know what you are thinking. They need to understand your expectations. This includes how you expect communications to be held while working remotely – i.e. how will teams collaborate, how will every be kept on the same page, how will they keep you updated on progress, etc.
Other expectations to outline are things like work hours, equipment policies, connectivity requirements (i.e. Wi-Fi), and health & safety guidelines.
- Establish a Trial Period
In reality, you will only know whether remote working works within your organization if you try it out. But if it turns out not to work, and you’ve already invested a lot of time and resources into setting it up, you will be in trouble.
A great solution is to hold a trial period, where the organization can test out remote working. This minimizes resource waste if it turns out to be a flop. But if it does prove successful, you will also get valuable feedback to further optimize remote working when you implement it fully.
- Train your Employees
Before you implement a trial period for remote working (and definitely before you implement it fully), you should train your employees on remote working.
Remote work training should include things like remote work expectations, managing workloads and productivity at home, how to use new software and systems that will be implemented, remote communication methods, etc.
- Evaluate your Existing Processes
If you’ve gone through a trial period, and it was successful, you it was successful, you will want to go ahead with implementing remote working – and one of the first steps should be to evaluate your existing processes. For instance, some processes in your organization will likely lend themselves to remote work – just like how TechQuarters found that their IT support services in London worked well even when they were remote. But there will definitely be other processes that are not ready for it.
You should go through and see what processes or operations need to be adapted so that they continue to function smoothly when people are working remotely.
- Develop the Right Onboarding Process
If you’re wanting to become a remote business, you will need to devise an onboarding process for new employees. The onboarding process encompasses many different activities and sessions that educate and train new hires on the processes and operations of your businesses – if those processes and operations have changed since you went remote, you will need to reflect that in your onboarding process.
Just like any onboarding process, yours should have a timeframe, including an itinerary of meetings (not to mention agendas for every meeting).
Share:
