Guest Post – Written by a Contributor
There is so much of a focus on the employee in the business now, not just how a company engages with its customers that it can inform so much about whether clients or consumers want to do business with them in the first place. One of the main areas when it comes to defining your business is how you engage with your employees.
Nobody wants a hands-off approach now, and if you are looking to hire people that are part of the new breed, you need to be flexible. But at the same time, you need them to be productive in return. When it comes to keeping your staff productive, there are various methods you can do on site, but also, off site. One of the hallmarks of flexible working now is giving your workers the opportunity to do their duties from home. So, what are the best ways to keep yourself productive, on and off site?
Constant Communication
Communication has its merits for every aspect of the business. Just because your staff are working off site, it doesn’t give them the right to work more freely. Of course, it’s harder to monitor their work off site, but there are things you can put in place to ensure that they are still touching base with you. Implementing communication to remote workers is much harder than it is on site. You can’t walk over to an employee for a quick catch up in the same way as you would on site. So, as conference calls and Skype meetings have become part of the everyday workplace fabric, implementing these communication tools will help to keep everybody on the same page.
Give Them The Tools
Giving your employees the tools, either for collaboration, or for doing their work, is a perfect way to create cohesion amongst your colleagues. A mobile device, appropriately patched, will be one of the best ways to ensure that your employees are working concurrently with everyone else on site, but there is a lot of work to be done with this. The BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device policy, is something that has been met with a mixed response. In one way, it does help to spearhead much more automation and fluidity within the employee/employer framework, but if you don’t have the appropriate policies and procedures, as well as protection methods, in place, it could be met with a lot of technological issues.
A QA automation engineer, or your CIO are two the people that could make this process smoother. And this will help to reduce a lot of the technological headaches when it comes to liaising with staff on and off site. In fact, by having your staff work on tech that is usable in the office and outside, it makes for a simpler task for your IT department, because they’re only focusing on one type of system. But of course, this is easier said than done in many respects. This is why it’s imperative you implement an appropriate policy first and foremost.
Define Your Bigger Picture
Communicating with your employees is a skill that you learn to control based on the situation. You learn different ways of communicating based on their attitudes, but also, you learn different tips and tricks to communicating with employees who work in a remote setting, such as via email, and it’s important for you to get your personality and goals across in as simple a form as possible. But while changing your wording from in person to text is one of those things that can take quite some time, the overarching idea behind this is the bigger picture.
As a business leader, it’s important for you to communicate the bigger picture as simply as possible, so that it can translate to text, email, or in person. Technology shouldn’t be a boundary to communication, it should enhance it. If you don’t communicate the bigger picture to your employees in general, it’s high time that you started. Keeping your staff productive on and off site is all about making sure that each staff member knows what they are working towards. Instead of keeping them in the dark, and only giving them a morsel of information, the bigger picture is vital through every part of the company.
Productivity isn’t all about metrics and tech, but it’s more about communication and how it is implemented properly. There are great tools to make every staff member productive, but when it comes to working on and off site, it shouldn’t be two different styles of leadership. Every staff member needs to feel that they are part of one unit, wherever they are.
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