Remote Work During the Coronavirus Outbreak Doesn’t Have to Be Scary

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, all of our lives have changed. People all over the world are practicing self-quarantine and social distancing. Many companies have started introducing remote work for most or all of their employees.

If your company is one of them and your employees are now working from home, you may feel panicked or even scared. However, there is nothing to be afraid of. The problems all of us are facing can and will be dealt with.

Before going any further with this article, we would like to wish you the best of luck during these unfortunate times. We sincerely hope you and all of your loved ones stay safe and healthy.

Now is the Right Time to Trust Your Employees

When you realized that remote work is going to happen, you probably started wondering about accountability. How do you know that your people are working? How can your employees show you that they’re getting stuff done?

The uncertainty happening here can lead to either you micromanaging your employees or they can overwork themselves to prove that they are, in fact, doing their job. None of the situations are good and luckily, both can be avoided. By cultivating a culture of trust within your company, your people will strive, even during hard times like these.

Set Clear Expectations for Your Team

Many business leaders working with remote workers argue that to build trust in the team quickly you need to create clear goals, share them with your team and make sure they stick to them.

A good way to do so is to have regular check-ins. Once a day, a few times a week or any other timeframe that works for you and your teammates, just make sure that everyone knows what’s expected of them. To ensure everyone is one the same page, decide how you expect the progress to be communicated and stick to them.

Don’t Expect Everyone to Be on Top of Their Game

You shouldn’t assume that the people who have started working from home pretty much overnight are going to be able to just jump into it. There has to be a period of adjustment for everyone. Show some flexibility to ensure your people know you care about them. If you expect your people to become remote instantly will most likely mean that efficiency will be lost. And unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about it.

Possibly the best example of a company quickly adapting to the current situation would be Wikimedia, which closed down all of its offices, deprioritized all non-essential projects that they have had going on and implemented a half-time, 20 hours a week, work for all staff and contractors. As Wikimedia’s CEO KK stated in a Medium post:

It is unreasonable and unrealistic to expect someone to be fully present, eight hours a day, when they have a three-year-old with crayons drawing on the wall, or an elderly parent who needs help navigating the stairs. We all have loved ones who need care, groceries that need purchasing, doctor’s appointments to keep, neighbors who need a phone call. And you know what? We trust our colleagues. People will work when they can, and when they can’t, we trust they’ll be right.

By doing the same in your company, you’ll help your team feel less stressed about the whole situation.

Start Cultivating an Online-First Culture

Usually, in an office environment, interpersonal relationships and company culture happen spontaneously in the physical space of an office, while almost all of the business and decision happens in the digital space.

Now, all of your operations are remote, you must find digital and online expressions for your company’s culture. All the watercooler talks, jokes, celebrations, personal interests, and the sense of community, now must be brought over to the online world and given a proper online channel that everyone can participate in. Basically, you need to create a virtual water cooler where all of your employees can talk to each other and have fun.

The time your people spend having fun and talking to each other shouldn’t be considered slacking off, it’s a way for teammates to connect and build stronger relationships which are key when the time comes to actually get stuff done.

Conclusion

While we still don’t know how long any of this will last for, we can be sure that it is going to end at some point. What we can do is stay at home, wash our hands often, practice social distancing, don’t panic, but stay alert.

All of these tribulations will make your team closer, stronger, and better equipped to deal with any challenges they will face in the future. And who knows, when all of this passes, maybe you’ll decide to continue working from home. However, right now, we all need to make sure that we and everyone around us stay safe.