Management Plan for Remote Work
Whether your organization is working on a Business Continuity Plan in response to the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak, or taking another look at a remote work policy to provide this highly valued benefit to employees, here are some concrete ways to help your organization be more flexible, resilient, and effective in remote work situations.
Identify all the programs and functions of your organization and determine which ones can do remote work easily, which ones can be done with significant technical support, and which ones cannot. To ensure equity and a well organized roll-out, all staff members need to have their concerns about their functions before you announce the plan.
Many organizations that do direct service work, won’t be able to be fully remote. For those functions that need technical support to re-route (like reception duties), you’ll have to figure out if you have the resources and the need to do so. For the staff that have to report to the office, try to offer flexibility within the work day. Many people are concerned about mass transportation; if your organization can allow staff to commute in off-peak times, it would make their commute less stressful so they can travel on less populated buses and trains.
Make an honest assessment about the state of your IT infrastructure. There are two elements to this assessment: Accessibility and Quality. For accessibility, don’t assume that all of your remote workers have the hardware, software, and internet to make at-home work as high functioning as the office environment. If an organization does require staff to work at home, they will need to make sure that laptops with the necessary software and internet is provided. Managers should also find out if their staff have adequate space to do their work uninterrupted. If a worker has a young child or other dependent to care for at home during the day, helping them find other suitable places (community room, library, or cafe) will prevent unneeded stress for everyone.
The Quality part of the assessment is that there may be some concessions that need to be made for remote work. For instance, some Remote Access environments don’t run software programs like Quickbooks and Microsoft Office quickly. Figure out if you need more cloud-based solutions or if there are easy work-arounds (like just uploading finished docs to the shared drive or using Google Docs) to keep your work flows moving.
Determine the Financial Investment needed to make remote work work. Add up all the staff-related hardware and software investments along with any platform investments to keep your work dynamic and staff engaged. Just switching to dial-in conference calls are poor substitutes for in-person meetings. Zoom video conferencing and Slack messaging are strong, affordable tools that can help keep people accountable and engaged.
Adapt your management processes to help teams feel anchored, but not constrained, by communication tools. Short video calls with your direct report at the start of the day to frame the to-do list, or a daily team practice of stating goals on a dedicated Slack channel, can help teams be accountable to their work flows and each other. Managers should check in on how Slack or other project management tools are being used or overused, so that staff have the time they need to get their work done. Encourage remote workers to use video whenever possible; people will participate more when they are around a virtual table and not just dialing in. Have team members state on their Slack statuses and/or calendars when they are done work or need DND time to get work done.
With some thoughtful planning for and with your staff, organizations can make their remote work environments effective and empowering, which is something we all want in this time of uncertainty. How is your organization approaching remote work?
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