Coronavirus: How to Keep Your Work from Home Employees Productive
Best Practices and policy for communicating with your work from home team.
There are many uncertainties surrounding COVID 19 today. It’s easy to be afraid and think only for ourselves. but challenges like this that inspire us to be better than ourselves, and to make the important choices that will protect our most vulnerable.
The spread of COVID-19 has quite literally taken the workplace by storm, decimating productivity across many industries and rapidly changing the way we think about work. Today’s leaders must take proactive steps to move their businesses forward in the face of this unprecedented epidemic, or risk losing everything.
Large companies like Microsoft and Amazon have already asked their employees to work from home, but with the spread of COVID-19 showing no end in sight-how viable is this going to be in the long term? How will the day to day expectations for employees change? And most importantly, how can companies keep productive in the face of COVID-19?
We, the people researchers at Rumarocket, offer our very own modest proposal for keeping businesses (and more importantly, people) productive in the face of uncertainties surrounding COVID-19. Our process involves implementing proactive policies around keeping your team engaged and motivated, while reducing the risk of their being affected by the coronavirus.
We have succeeded in implementing a work from home policy since 2017 (due to the terrible traffic in our lovely Manila), and we’ve built a set of strategies and policies that are easy to implement for work from home employees.
In this article we’ll be covering the most crucial element of working from home: Communication.
Let’s get started!
Policy 1: Determine your primary communication channels.
(Don’t let it be email.)
One big challenge we had when we started out was that there were too many possible communication channels: Whatsapp, Viber, Slack, Email, Skype. Etc. Our staff used to have 5 or 6 apps open at the same time to ensure they didn’t miss any urgent message.
What was more frustrating was that communications happened over different channels, leaving out key people who needed to be in the loop. For example: our sales people would communicate with the client over Whatsapp without linking the developer’s to the communication. When working face to face, this challenge is easy to address as you can just talk directly to the person, but working from home requires employees to be more deliberate about how they communicate:
At Rumarocket: we set clear boundaries, Slack for internal communication, Email is for external communication. By defining the primary communication channel everyone knows where to go for updates and communication.
DO NOT: Add people to multiple communication channels. It is easy and human instinct to just add your colleague into another Whatsapp group or another Slack group but what happens is communications are now spread across various channels making it easy to miscommunicate.
DO NOT: Expect to have a robust team discussion on email. Email was not designed for communication between multiple parties, apps like Slack, Viber or Whatsapp are better for that.
Policy 2: The Daily Routine
Most of us have established daily rituals in the office: 8:30 am reach work, 9:00 am make coffee, 9:30 am answer emails etc. Similarly, working from home requires employees to religiously follow a daily ritual to maximize their productivity. This is how we were able to do it at Rumarocket:
9:00 AM - Have a Good Morning Roll Call
One of the biggest challenges with working from home is people oversleeping or finding it hard to start working because their bed and house is so comfortable. So at 9am every morning, all our team members regardless of if they are in the office or not give a morning briefing and it looks like this.
James: “Good morning! I will be working from home today.
1. I will be:
- Working on the Marketing Proposal
- Replying Emails
2. I need help
from _________ (Tom) to complete ____________ (sending me the accounting numbers) in order to complete ______________ (uploading the report)
It sounds really obvious but having a standardized good morning template helps not only the team lead to know what each team member is doing but also synchronizes the rest of the team with what the priorities are for the rest of the team members.
It can be a surprise when it’s 6pm and the task we thought our teammates were working on was not completed, especially since we can’t physically see what they are working on.
Most importantly if someone misses the morning check in it might be a good idea to give them a call to make sure they are out of bed.
3:00 PM/ Lunch Midday check in.
Similar to the good morning check in, a mid day check in at a set time, ensures people are held accountable for the work they have done
Good Afternoon.
1. I have completed ______
2. I will be working on _______
3. I am waiting for:
_________ (Tom) to complete ____________ (sending me the accounting numbers) in order to complete ______________ (uploading the report)
4. I am having challenges with
-Slow internet access
Having a midday check ensures that managers are able to monitor the work that is done as well as the reasons for why tasks are being delayed or what the bottlenecks are. It also prevents procrastination as teammates need to be able to account for how they use their time.
6:00 PM See you tomorrow
1. I have completed: _________
2. I am waiting for: ___________
3. I am having challenges with: __________
See you tomorrow!
This seems redundant in a physical office to say “see you tomorrow” because if we don’t see our colleague, we know he’s left for the day. Not so in the virtual world. Having a clear boundary between when is personal time and when is work time is important to your team’s mental health. It allows your team to be able to relax and recoup for the next day.
Best Practices for Communication
For teams that have never done work from home before it is essential to repeat to your team the following rules every day so people understand. Do this as a ritual in your morning check-ins and repeat the rules as often as possible. While not exactly a policy these are good practices to follow.
1. Communicate like a bomb squad.
In the physical world we can see if the other person has heard our message or is still replying, it’s easy to forget that doesn’t apply in the online world. One good practice is to look at how bomb experts communicate, they wait for the other person to acknowledge and do not interrupt until the other person is done.
-Acknowledging the message is important. A simple, “Noted” or “Got it! Let me think!” Is crucial as we don’t want our team members to be left hanging wondering if they got our message.
-Waiting for others or confirming if others are done is also important. This is especially so If you have members of the team that like to write long paragraphs or type multiple messages. We don’t talk over each other in real life, so to ensure we don’t do that online we usually end our statements with a question.
2. AFK — Away from keyboard.
In the physical world, if we are not at our desk others can see that. However, in the digital space, announcing and being accountable to where you are and your availability to respond is important. Online gamers do this often when communicating with their teammates, with small messages like. “AFK-restroom” or “AFK-lunch”.
Remember! Announcing when you are back at your keyboard is also important as someone might have a question for you.
3. Don’t expect instant communication.
In a connected world we often expect people to respond quickly or almost instantly to our messages. New managers managing work from home staff often get anxious and wonder if employees are actually doing work. They often treat non-responsiveness as being lazy or not productive, that however is not always true.
When working from home, in order for your teammates to be productive, they cannot be checking their messages every 5 minutes. People need time to sit down and concentrate on doing good work. Think of it as the office version of ‘putting headphones on’ if we want to concentrate.
Especially in countries where internet connection is bad, your team mate might not be responding simply because the connection is bad in his area. This is why the designated daily check-in times are important and need to be set as policy. Having a set time allows us to know if everyone will be there and your team will be focused on communicating.
4. Communicate for personality.
Different teammates need different things. Some look for acknowledgement, some look for confirmation and security in the job they are doing. Others thrive on interacting with others: to them working from home is a terrible and lonely experience.
If you are unsure how to customize for each teammate, Rumarocket’s A.I assesses the habits and profile of your team and sends you specific recommendations for each teammate. Specific actions such as Digital Coffee Breaks for extroverts, or focused Pomodoro sprints for the easily distracted.
In times of crisis, it is a chance for people to become braver and more compassionate than they could have imagined. By using our empathy we can create ways for our team to be as productive as they would be in the office.
Do let us know if this series is useful and comment on what topic we should do next.
1. The Set up — Hardware, Software, Reimbursements and Tracking, how to ensure your remote teammate has all the equipment they need.
2. For workers who need to do most of their work on premises (factories or offices), what can companies do to reduce the risk of community spread?
3. Not everything needs to be a meeting: how to run effective virtual meetings and to prioritise communication
If you find this article useful, don’t forget to comment and send as an e-mail at info@rumarocket.com on questions that you’d like us to tackle next.
