It can be argued there’s never been a more important time in your company’s history than now to focus on company culture. With the majority of Canadian businesses being forced to shut their doors and have their employees work from home, it’s understandable if employee morale is at an all-time low.
Hold regularly scheduled meetings.
Believe it or not, at least half or more of your employees miss coming into the office. The structure and rituals of the office work day can be a big part of productivity. At home, “structure” isn’t exactly the operative word. To keep your team members engaged, it’s important to remind them how much their efforts mean to your business during regularly scheduled meetings via phone or video conference.
“Pulling key stakeholders into a meeting room is easy when you’re in the same office – but staying in touch can get a bit trickier when everyone’s working remotely,” acknowledges Liam Jones on Perkbox.com, “We recommend setting up regular meetings and sticking to them. This helps keep everyone in the loop and reduces the odds of someone missing out on crucial information.”
Devote time to conduct personal check-ins.
With your team working from home, it’s not so easy to make the personal connections you had the opportunity to make in your office. Extra effort is required, on your part, to reach out to employees to find out how they’re doing. Be sure to make some of your communications non-work related.
How do you enjoy your home-based workspace? How are you managing with homeschooling your children? These are just a couple of the questions you may want to ask in order to assess the emotional well-being of your valued employees.
“Talk to your remote teams about scheduling facetime and get their opinion on which would work best for everybody (don’t forget to include onsite employees),” advises 6Q, “Those relationships are important to your business. Use webinars, videos and conference calls to create a sense of community for everyone, including your distributed workforce.”
Set up group chats.
Keeping in contact with each of your employees while they are practicing self-isolation is important. But are they keeping in contact with each other? Ensure your team members are in communication with each other by setting up group chat.
“It’s important to keep working at your company culture, even when you and your employees are working remotely,” agrees Jones, “A group chat is a good starting point – a place for everyone to say hello at the start of the day and exchange watercooler style chat. You can take this to the next level with a few extracurricular groups. Book clubs can work just as well over video calls, as could watching a film at the same time or gaming with each other online.”
For more ideas on how to boost employee morale, contact Hire Value Inc. today!
