Working From Home Can Be Really Hard
With almost all of us having to work from home these days, it’s likely you have noticed that some of your staff and their teams may be feeling disconnected, anxious, isolated, and/or unproductive.
When talking to our clients, friends, and family, we’re hearing a common story of employees who are growing increasingly frustrated to be working remotely and struggling to stay positive in this difficult time.
Left unchecked—even once the coronavirus crisis is over—this anxiety could evolve into serious mental health problems, long-term sick leave, and churn. In the short-term, this means unhappy and unproductive people.
In order to help understand how your staff are feeling, we’ve developed a terrific tool for assessing remote worker well-being. The easy-to-use, online instrument is fully-customizable to the specific needs of your team; and includes terrific resources designed with the needs of your remote employees in mind.
Remote Worker Support Services
Our Remote Worker Well-Being Assessment will help your leadership team in three important ways:
1. Find out how your people are coping.
- How are employees handling the transition to remote work?
- How effective is remote collaboration with colleagues?
- Do your employees feel supported by managers and leadership?
- What’s working well?
- What needs improvement?
- What terrific ideas do they have?
2. Provide managers the feedback and guidance they need to fully support your staff.
Each of your team leaders will receive a detailed feedback report full of information that will help them better understand the pain points affecting employees, and the relative priority of addressing those issues.
Working together, we can then help you share specific guidance with managers on how to address the most pressing issues. For example, how to help employees escalate and address problems accessing or using remote tools; or managing their own physical or mental health.
3. Pinpoint where HR and leadership can help.
Our process also makes it possible for leadership to review results at the organizational level in order to:
- Identify which specific areas need immediate attention;
- Identify teams or departments (or particular demographics) that need targeted support;
- Review best practices and resources you can use now and in the future; and
- Create an action plan for ensuring that you are as ready as possible for navigating the future needs of your remote staff.
You may discover some issues that you were aware of and are already being managed. For example, if the VPN is complicating work flows now that everyone is logging in remotely, it’s likely that your IT team already knows there is a problem and is doing everything they can to fix it.
But, you can also expect to uncover some issues that are less evident, yet still important to address. For example, some employees may be struggling to find time with their managers, or feeling that their concerns are not being heard in virtual forums. These types of concerns are not always uncovered without intentional intervention.
How Does It Work?
We have designed a cost-effective assessment process that is straight-forward, easy-to-use, and completely customizable. It is a fully online process with world class security, appropriate engagement strategies, and outstanding response analysis tools built-in.
While the survey itself can be completed in 5-10 minutes, it yields a tremendous amount of data that we will curate for you.
Our flexible support is end-to-end and is intended to remove any risk you may feel about surveying your employees.
In fact, we are happy to work with you to conduct a small pilot assessment—perhaps one manager and their team. We’ll agree together on the questions, administer the survey, review the data and lessons learned, and make follow-on recommendations. At that point, you can decide it it makes sense to scale-up the assessment process across your entire organization.
The Future of Work
As human beings, our status quo bias is strong. We prefer the familiar, the usual.
When it comes to our basic understanding of what work is and what it entails, everything we thought we knew is being turned upside down.
But how amazing is it that we have this opportunity—all of us in the world at once—to step outside of our collective comfort zones, embrace the unfamiliar, innovate, and, in the case of our amazing employees, imagine and engineer incredible new ways to work together remotely!
It’s amazing that we have the chance to dig into our organizational cultures and simultaneously embrace a new and evolving future.
We are excited to be a part of that effort, together, with you. Let’s get started!
Read more about our remote worker support (and other virtual and online) services here.
Remote work is this incredible invitation to really get good at building inclusive cultures where there’s a wide variety of types of people, and to build a culture where everyone feels included and everyone is experiencing ongoing growth and development on a regular basis. That’s the challenge, and it’s not an easy one. But the business isn’t easy.