A recent survey of CIOs worldwide by the ETR (Enterprise Technology Research) revealed that 72% of businesses work remotely today.
This means roughly three-fourths of the global working population are running about trying to find the new normal. But, unfortunately, while some business functions have thrived in adapting to the remote setup, others have failed.
As a business owner, you might wonder if your organization needs to create a hybrid work culture and ecosystem to survive these uncertain times.
The simple answer? Yes.
To help you navigate these difficult times and build an empowered remote workforce, we’ve crafted this article to elaborate on the different ways you can help set your teams up for business success.
Let’s begin!
Five Ways Businesses Can Empower Their Remote Workforce
1. Enable Employees to Set Up Office Spaces at Home
No employees ever thought that their own homes would turn into their workspaces. So it’s only natural that they lack the needed resources to carry forth their day-to-day tasks successfully.
Businesses keen on ensuring a smooth transition from in-office to in-home workspaces need to understand that enabling employees with the proper hardware and software won’t cut it anymore. It now goes beyond that.
An excellent way to understand and help employees here would be to directly talk to them and address their challenges with remote work. For example, some of the most common challenges they may report are:
- No power backup.
- Bad internet connectivity.
- No designated “office space” at home.
Globally, companies that have addressed this challenge have overcome it by giving their employees a fixed amount of money to set up an office at home. This tiny gesture goes a long way in letting employees know that you genuinely care about their well-being, remote or not.
2. Enable seamless Collaborations and Communications Across the Company
Remote work has changed the nature of in-person workflows and processes. This needs to be fixed as a priority for your business to ensure sustainability.
Inaccurate communication, when combined with undocumented conversations, is going to cost your teams. But luckily, there are several tools out there that can come to your immediate rescue.
Software like Zoom and Slack enable cross-team communications while also letting employees share files and other media, just like they’d do on WhatsApp. This makes communication more effortless than ever, and what’s more, all your information is documented with zero additional effort. The usage of such software has also shown a significant improvement in employee engagement and productivity.
3. Encourage Remote Meetings and Gatherings for Non-operational Purposes
It’s no surprise that employee engagement was much higher in an office space. Remote work has made employees and teams run around to change and standardize processes, leaving little time for them to connect personally.
Keeping aside business meetings, leaders and HRs need to encourage employees to gather for non-operational purposes. This would set up perfect situations for them to have honest conversations to develop a unique sense of bonding and friendship regardless of the physical distance.
Such bonds and relationships also enable them to navigate these complicated times to get work done in the best possible way.
4. Encourage Your Teams to Leverage the Power of Digital Technology
The pandemic has been a huge reset button for almost all business workflows, processes, and communication. As we have already seen, manual processes just don’t work anymore.
Businesses need to adapt to technology that can bridge the physical gap and address these problems efficiently.
A digital transformation enables businesses to add a layer of security, control, and accuracy over all business functions. In addition, simplifying operations frees up time for high-impact tasks that let your business grow.
A quick list of software to start with:
- Trello: To virtually manage all your tasks and projects.
- Notion: To thoroughly document company-wide communication.
- Fyle: To enable a seamless expense management process.
- Google Drive: Secure storage for all your files.
- CultureAmp: To know the pulse of your employees.
- TrackingTime: To track time and keep up with your team’s work.
- LeadsBridge: To enhance your omnichannel strategy.
5. Protect Your Finances by Automating Expense Management
At the heart of every successful business is rock-solid finances. However, with remote work, the added physical distance combined with broken processes has left Finance teams working for numerous hours to get a rough estimate of the whole picture.
With remote work, manual expense management just breaks and leaves your business open to multiple financial leaks through inaccurate records, expense fraud, and much more. As a result, companies worldwide have slowly begun to shift to an expense management software to address these issues.
An expense report software effortlessly streamlines all broken financial processes and frees up time for case-sensitive tasks like fraud detection and manual verifications. This provides Finance teams with all the information they’d need to ensure that your company finances are always safe.
Conclusion
Whether in-office or remote, businesses need to adapt to change if they’re going to stand the test of time.
McKinsey revealed in a recent study that 31% of businesses have completely automated at least one core business function.
There’s no denying that change is inevitable. The only question here is whether your organization will embrace this change to succeed and scale.
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