How To Improve Your Working From Home Culture – Brilliant Basics
Introduction
It has been really interesting to observe the reaction of businesses and individual leaders during recent times. For those that hadn’t worked remotely in the past almost all leaders, managers and employees struggled with the concept to start off with. However, as time has passed and our businesses have evolved, it has become more comfortable for most. Here’s some of the benefits that you may have noticed: more time to spend with family, better focus on physical health and no dreaded commute! All of which has provided employees with more time and therefore an opportunity to drive performance. Working from home has taken away the opportunity to see our colleagues/clients face to face, have quick interactions and also impacted many people’s Wellbeing, but there’s a solution to all of these issues.
Despite the opportunities provided during this time, if your leadership team demonstrate a FIXED mindset, as appose to a growth mindset, then you’ll find yourselves on a decline in performance, productivity and ultimately profitability. Now is a time to focus on your people, not anything else.
The following blog aims to provide senior leaders and HR teams with some very simple and easy to implement ideas that will help you to drive a culture of trust and support during these difficult times, both of which could accelerate your opportunity to drive high performance.
If you have not read our content before, then please be aware that our “Brilliant Basics” Content is purposely simplistic and ensures that our network “run before they can walk”.
Click Here To Download Our 5 Considerations For Businesses Post Lockdown Paper
People Management
- Monthly 1-1’s – You probably already have a manager and employee 1-1 system in place. However, we recommend having shorter monthly 1-1’s which focus on goals, targets and behaviours.
- Team huddles – Every Monday or Friday each team gets together to discuss priorities for the week – what has gone well – what has not gone so well.
- Check in’s – Alongside the monthly 1-1’s we’ve seen our clients benefit from fortnightly check in’s, using these simple questions. 1) What is going well? 2) What could you be doing better? 3) What support do you need from the business? 4) How are you feeling? Is there anything that you need with financially, physically or psychologically?
Benefits
One of our clients, a London based Insurance company, has decided to scrap most of its employee benefits and instead offer employees an allowance. This can be used to purchase home office equipment or invest into personal hobbies such as books for reading, gardening equipment etc.
Over communicate
Our client Lucion Services received brilliant feedback in their recent employee survey for their communication. Every day their CEO has reached out to the business to provide updates on the industry, government and most importantly the business. How regularly have you been communicating? Could you be doing more to improve communication? What internal channels have you been using to reach your audience?
Core Work Hours
Every business that we work with has adopted a slightly different approach to working from home. Some have given their team full flexibility and some have tried to replicate the same structure that they had in the office. However, if you’re still not sure which approach works best for your business then why not try core work hours? For example; you may say that all team members need to be available between 10am-2pm for calls/projects etc, but what they do outside of those hours is up to them – providing they meet their objectives.
Working from home guide
James Kilby from Invosys Group came up with the great idea of putting together a working from home guide. The purpose of this document is to provide employees with guide on how to structure their day, manage their wellbeing and a general reminder of who to contact for what. Simple but effective!
Click Here To Download Our Return To Work Paper
Conclusion
In conclusion, we’ve learnt that the most important thing to focus on whilst working from home is your approach to people management. Those that build trust and make employees feel safe will progress much faster than those who focus purely on their customers.
Check out some of our latest FREE offers that is helping businesses who are working from home…
- 30 days access to our employee engagement platform – providing you the opportunity to run as many pulse surveys as you like and gather feedback from your team.
- Financial Wellbeing Workshops – we have a number of pre-designed workshops that aim to help your team to better manager their Finances. We have crafted different workshops for each aspect of life. You can have up to 20 members of your team on a workshop and book as many workshops as you like.
- Emotional Intelligence and Assessment Report – our GC Index tool helps individuals to better understand their personal impact on the team that they work in and the business itself.
- Coaching session for managers – one hour coaching session with managers who are leading teams remotely for the first time.
Matt Wilden
07711 066222
