At the realm of change in these times of the epidemic. The business landscape is changing and the businesses need to adapt to this paradigm shift of work from home or remote working.

With the whole world encouraging and mandating remote work. It is important that your team members have a smooth WfH experience along with focus on ways to get critical work done.

Here are five simple ways to keep your team productive while they are working from home.

1. Establish daily check-ins: The first impact of social distancing will be no face time interactions between the teams, and a lack of connection. Thus creating a daily check-in routine is very important, to set priorities and foster connections. A morning check-in via video chat, phone call or instant message can create a sense of normalcy. These check-ins can be one-on-one or held among small groups. Various tech tools like Google meet, Zoom, whats app video calls with free usage can help revamp regular check-ins.
2. Dress professionally: Working from home gives the liberty to work in your home clothes, but it’s psychologically important that you dress professionally to be more productive. Dressing appropriately provides the self confidence and boost to focus on important tasks off your list and makes you feel more comfortable hopping on any video call with clients or co-workers.
3. Equip your team with online tools: Its the right time to start moving your office work from offline to online. Thus educate your team and provide them tools which will assist communication, connectivity and empower your team members with transparent working practices. Applications like Microsoft teams, Slack etc. can be utilised for Chat or messages. Video conference applications like Hangouts, Meet, Zoom etc. can used for connectivity and communications. You can also utilize OOM, a simple online office practice management tool with integrated approach. These new technologies allow teams to stay on the same page no matter where they are working from. Post COVID-19 these new apps might help keep your team more productive and connected even at your work places.
4. Provide support to your people: This new paradigm shift in the work scenario requires the leaders to provide motivation, support and guidance. Support can be from grass root levels like encouraging self-care among them, to help them adapt to remote work, manage stress due to merging of home and work environments, cope with the additional stress of daily news updates around COVID-19.
5. Bonding and team building:Facilitate and start interactions which help connect and bind the team. Have sessions/ quiz or calls between teams on hobbies, games, and other topics — lets give an opportunity to interact like we did in our office spaces. Keep open networking sessions before and after internal video conferences, which help people to catch up. Or you could have a party where all join in from their homes, with a same food theme….just to help maintain and foster the bonding between team members.

Remember to define your virtual office hours and make sure that all are available for instant messaging apps/ video calls throughout the day to help the team.

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