From our episode “Make ‘Work from Anywhere’ Work for Your Company” with Jackye Clayton
Since the COVID-19 pandemic happened, almost all of the people worked from home. It wasn’t easy adjusting to it, but we found innovative ways to make it easier to help with our productivity.
We’ve opened our homes up and our hearts have opened up a little bit more. COVID has definitely caused us to just say, “We are human, and we’re not a bunch of robots who are just going to pull through COVID.” It has made us okay to be vulnerable. The shift towards being more vulnerable at work is happening.
It’s given us an opportunity to really be like that distributed team and learn about different cultures or learn about what’s going on in different places.
Working at Home Tips:
1. Use channels to communicate with your employees
It will facilitate the bonding that happens when you’re in an office. What’s really fun is that you can be so collaborative and come up with ideas. It’s so important that you recognize that, even though you feel like you’re alone, there are other people. You don’t have to shoulder the burden alone.
2. Grow with your team
As you go on that journey together, then you can share more things, especially things like what’s working and what’s not working or those bad days.
3. Be nimble
It’s hard to be nimble, but by giving the departments the opportunity to be nimble on their own and then report back on what’s working well, the rest of the company can adopt whatever is working.
Everyday, you have a chance and a choice
The ability to work at whatever hours helps productivity. It’s helpful to know that that’s in place so that I started working out, and I never would have done that before, even though I’ve worked at home, because now we have the freedom of choice.
Why not just let people work at the time that works for them? If they’re super productive at an hour when the office technically isn’t open, that’s fine as long as you know if they need to be answering customer phone calls. What’s the harm in letting people work at a time that works for them? It’s going to make them happier, healthier, and more productive.
1. Allow people to show up at the time that’s best for them
If they come at noon, then they come at noon. It’s the same thing that you would give people that are at home.
2. Have a policy
If it’s something that affects the whole organization, make sure that you are putting it to the whole team. If you start a Zoom, you invite everybody, and you make sure that you’re scheduling it at a time where everybody can come.
3. Give the same benefits
Give a wellness budget and a work-at-home budget. Give people a stipend, and that means you want to be fair and equitable. Everyone gets a wellness budget that can help them work in those environments.
There could be resentment, but it all boils down to having the competencies, knowledge, skills, and abilities. So you can be fair in all the ways that you can possibly think of. If remote people get some sort of home office stipend, then the people coming to work should get the same amount of money for something else.
If your organization is really bureaucratic, it’s probably harder for you to manage COVID. Some cultures are going to survive by letting everything go and just moving on a dime. This is a lot better than others just because they were able to adapt and they were able to accept the innovative ideas that their employees had about how to function in this world, and they were able to adapt to new software and apps and whatever to make things go.
With the great resignation comes a lot of data related to why people leave, and it’s so easy for employers to say, “Well, you know, they went off to leave construction and they want to start a yoga studio or whatever.” But I would argue that it has to do with your culture and not giving the employees something they need.
Lastly, do stay interviews. I don’t think people do that enough, figuring out why people are staying, and I know that it can be a really scary time. But I think it makes sense. Just evaluate. The good news is that you don’t have to guess. You can talk to your employees, and you can see what is working and work in that direction. If you ask the right questions, you will get the right answers on the test. You don’t have to make it up.
