The unprecedented times that began with the spread of coronavirus have caused economic, health, and social devastation. Apart from the misery and frustration, coronavirus spread has started the globe’s biggest workplace experiment. This experiment has led to the discovery of some fascinating insights that will have significant implications for the future of business and workplace.

To assess employees’ sentiments regarding the abrupt change in wok mode, many organizations decided to conduct surveys. One such organization was BCG that surveyed more than 12,000 professionals that were employed before and even during the COVID-19 from the end of May and throughout June. Responses were collected from employees working in the US, Germany, and India. The respondents in this survey were responsible for a wide range of duties and were working on different positions such as analysts, HR personnel, health care providers, cashier, engineers, and more. The survey explored the attitudes of employees towards their productivity, flexibility, well-being, career security, social connectivity, culture, development, and also towards the work tools they use.

The results were quite shocking. The unexpected insights showed that the pandemic-related changes and the fact that everything changed so abruptly, it was expected that productivity must have taken a huge hit. However, the surveyed showed that employees were able to maintain and even improve their productivity.

The responses even depicted employees’ expectations towards the future of work with remote working. Even managers showed their openness to this mode of working.

While there can be a difference of opinion, it is safe to say that overall employees’ productivity can be optimized during the pandemic with training and preparation.

Now that we have figured out that remote working is not altogether bad for employees, it is time for businesses to learn ways on how to earn benefit from this situation.

To help small businesses, we have created a list of tips that can help them embrace and benefit from the remote working situation.

Rethink Communication Styles

Communication, with or without remote working, is extremely crucial for a business. However, in remote working the basics of communication changes. For instance, in office setting, popping over your colleague’s desk to ask something is not difficult, but in remote working, pinging your colleague repeatedly over communication platform might become annoying and hence some might hesitate to do it.

Many companies had become so used to in-person meetings that embracing remote working methods of communication have become hard for them. However, with the right management and communication tools, many small businesses have started bridging this gap.

If you are part of a small business set up then you can start communication flow from having virtual meetings on Zoom to a team collaboration channel on some work management software such as Trello or Asana. There are various other tools that can help you with collaboration and communication in these times.

Reflect Company’s Policies and Values

The initial shock given the COVID-19 was hard for everyone to process. Now that the initial shock has sort of faded it is time for business, especially small businesses to get back on track.

The sudden onset of the pandemic led to employees quickly yet unpreparedly embrace the remote working culture. This unpreparedness brought great difficulties to companies in the form of security risk and low productivity.

However, now is the time when employers should start reflecting a company’s policies, guidelines, and values in their virtual behavior.

Employers should focus on their company’s security and productivity of their employees and for this, they need to adapt their management style and make sure that all employees working at home take full responsibility of their tasks. Apart from this, employers should discuss the newly set guidelines to carry out work from home smoothly with employees.

Apart from management, employees should now also be in a position to adapt themselves to the entire work from situation, which means they should equip themselves with the right things including a reliable high-speed internet service provider at home to make sure they face no hindrance in working. If they have not connected to one such internet service provider that offers reliable and good internet speed then employers should suggest them one.

Spectrum Internet service is one such name that employers can count on and suggest to their employees for work from home. With just a call on Spectrum Phone, employees can get access to a reliable and affordable high-speed internet service provider.

Measure Outcome

Now that employees are not working from the office, it might have become hard for managers to evaluate their performance. However, it would not be that hard, only if managers understood that they do not need to micromanage their employees. Instead, what they need to do is measure the outcomes they have set for each employee to know how a company is working throughout the pandemic.

Conclusion

Remote working is here to stay at least until there is a vaccine for the virus and we get rid of for good. So now, it is up to every company to turn this new normal into a bane or a boon.