April 13, 2020
Maintaining the wellbeing of your employees, while they work from home
To stop the spread of COVID-19, organisations are beginning to encourage their staff to work from home. This is the most safe and logical way of keeping your business running as normal, whilst protecting your staff.
A few of the world’s largest organisations have recently advised their workers to remain at home, including Virgin Holidays, Ford, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook. Royal Bank of Scotland prompted office staff to work from, massively reducing the number of individuals in their office areas.
Naturally, bigger organisations will have strong homeworking plans set up as they may already have a certain level of homeworking as standard. However, for smaller businesses the concept of your employees working from home will be a lot more daunting.
In our Return-to-Work guide, we offer advice and guidance of what solutions you need to protect your staff irrespective of their workspace.
Adjusting to homeworking
It may be difficult for employees to adjust to another work style. In the event that a normal working day includes a busy office environment, calling buyers/customers or going to meetings, the new home working strategy can negatively affect employee’s emotional wellbeing and mental-health as this uncommon change can cause a strong sense of disconnection.
A 2019 report on the State of Remote Work by Buffer states that 49% of remote workers note that their greatest problem is wellbeing related. All the more explicitly, 22% can’t unplug after work, 19% feel forlorn and 8% can’t remain motivated. These figures are expected to grow significantly, following the Coronavirus pandemic bringing about huge number of employees directed to work from home.
Shifting from a public workplace to the limited space of your own home can influence everybody. It’s vital that you adopt new approaches to ensure your people remain happy and productive in light of the current situation.
Here are a few ways you can help the mental health and wellbeing of your employees.
Stay in touch
The World Health Organisation (WHO) released a mental health guide for people who are self-isolating saying: “This time of crisis is generating stress in the population.”
Securing employees’ psychological and emotional wellness doesn’t need to be on overpowering assignment, and even a quick short call can go far.
These could be on daily basis, or weekly after work calls or even better video calls. The thought is that you can constantly survey work process, set new assignments and check your team’s wellness.
Working from home may be causing unanticipated issues for staff, so it’s critical to get input where you can. It likewise opens up the chance to have a conversation that isn’t business related, asking after their family, talking about the news and so on.
Support a healthy work-life balance
While you may stress that a few employees may accept home working as a chance to take it a little easy, as a general rule, many will feel strain to work more earnestly, or longer hours, to demonstrate they are dedicated.
As a business you need to adjust for productivity by urging workers to continue to take breaks. When working from home it tends to be anything but difficult to feel enticed to remain at your computer all through your lunch or broaden the day’s end by a couple of hours.
Be sure to urge staff to work their contracted hours and don’t extend their working day into home life basically in light of the fact that they’re working from home. Likewise with everything, balance is critical.
Organise regular group meetings
We live in a more interlinked world than any other time in recent memory, so with regards to keeping the entire group associated, innovation is genuinely on your side. Attempt to keep group meetings and catch-ups planned for your programmes by utilising online platforms like Teams and Zoom as your approach to connect.
This has a dual impact: first it keeps the consistency of the typical working week, and that will make keeping your business running simpler than if regular meetings delayed or postponed. Also, it assists with recreating the environment of the ordinary workplace, helping people to socialise and interact on a personal level.
Opt for collaborative tools and platforms
There are a lot of tools that help employees to communicate with each other, for example, Asana, Zoom, Basecamp, Trello and Flock. These enable everybody to monitor projects and who they’re allotted to. Employees can frequently feel like they’re on an island so by being able to encircle themselves with other team members through these collaborations, their efficiency and morale can be boosted.
For more information on how we can help, please call +44 20 8447 4690 to talk to one of our workspace specialists or email our team at hello@limelightworkspace.co.uk