In the last few days, our Governor Mike DeWine recently announced that our beautiful home state of Ohio will continue to enforce social distancing practices throughout the month of April. At the inception of social distancing, most individuals mistook the idea as a temporary obstacle, to suspend business for a week and promptly be back to business as usual. Here in Ohio, a two week obstacle has evolved into a six week reality. The time has come to start building your Virtual A-Team, and set them up for long term success.
Your culture doesn’t have to stay at the office
You have worked tirelessly to keep people involved and happy to come to work and participate. Do not curb this attribute just because you are no longer in close proximity to your coworkers. It is still within your power to coach, support, and celebrate the efforts of your team. Be sure to continue to communicate daily via tele-conference (skype, facetime, google hangouts, etc), or send a message to an employee who has shown diligent work despite difficult conditions. The biggest concern related to working remotely is staying focused and motivated, therefore managers must keep their employees engaged and incentivized!
Don’t let yourself be caught in the blind
Working in an open office environment, an employee inappropriately using company time would be easy to spot. However, there needs to be a precaution taken for monitoring every individual working remotely. We highly recommend consulting an HR Professional and adopting software that will enable your employees to create an accurate log of their work hours (clockify, TimeClock, etc). Programs such as these will provide for you invaluable data and understanding as to how your employees are utilizing their time. Some of these tools may also find good use in the office space when we return to normalcy (developing training aides, evaluation standards, waste elimination, etc).
Be open to change and make analytical decisions
Just as many individuals had not foreseen the extension ordered by our local government, we must be prepared to adapt to sudden changes and make decisions based on the data we should be continuously collecting. Agility has always remained paramount in the survivability of an organization and the ability to change quickly is a competitive advantage in and of itself.
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Michael Chiovitti, Chief Talent Strategist
Eden Resources, LLC
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