Communication Challenges of Remote Work- What this Means for your Company?

Remote work has been gaining popularity since the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. With the increase in lockdowns and social distancing regulations, this was the norm for quite some time. However, even beyond the pandemic, this is somewhat the future of work for many businesses and quite beneficial when you talk about recruiting experts from all over the world, providing flexible workspaces, and cutting down on space expenses for the offices.

While there are many advantages of working from home for employees and employers, there are specific challenges, especially regarding proper communications with such a practice. It can mean quite differently for different businesses. Let us take a look at what these challenges can be and how they might affect your company.

Open Lines of Communications

It is essential to ensure that the lines for communications are open when the employees are working online from home. It means videoconferencing and remote meeting tools have been increasing in popularity. To ensure that all your employees are on the same page, you might consider holding all the meetings through Zoom and FaceTime. However, you must also keep a clear expectation of the employee who is working remotely.

You can set specific rules about your employees responding in a particular channel or time to emails sent from the supervisor or manager at certain times of the day. It can mean something like leaving a voice mail, responding within a given frame of time, etc. When there is a company policy for working hours and responses for communications, the company is likely to get more responsive employees.

You can also decide for your employees to check in with you a few times on the day. The policies can also be designed to tell them how exactly they should return messages from their colleagues and their bosses. When you make it clear for people to understand what is expected from them, the response is likely to be better.

What Does It Mean for Your Company?

Identifying the right mean of communication, managing security issues, increasing productivity, and improving workers’ well-being are 4 good reasons to embrace monitoring.

When you want to facilitate good communications, ensuring that your employees are not wasting too much time scrolling through websites outside their work business or social media, you need to take some extra steps during hours that they are being clocked in for. It means additional monitoring, management, and recording.

Monitoring Tools

There are several tools available to track the performance and monitor the computer activity of your employees in real-time.

It includes monitoring what the employee is surfing on the internet, keystrokes, printing and downloading. You also disable the unable websites or features in the electronics of your employees.

Managing the Employee Activities

Sometimes you need to do more than monitor the activity of your employees working remotely. It means not being limited to tracking their activity but managing them as well. However, make sure not to make them feel pressurized which is a great productivity killers.

It can be done through a set of management rules whereby you can run, block, direct, and re-direct and schedule and categorize depending on what the call of the hour is. There are several tools available for this as well.

Concluding Remarks

You must maintain an accurate report and analyze your business’s activity and communication strategies when you have an increased number of employees working from home. With the right tool with sufficient reporting, management, tracking, and filtering, you can increase the productivity and efficiency of your employees.