While there is now light at the end of the tunnel in terms of vaccine rollouts, the current COVID-19 infection rate and restrictions on our lives are greater now than they have ever been before.
With employees working from home, many organizations are taking steps to stay well connected at every level of the organization by actively listening and quickly supporting individual team members. Here’s how companies can ensure their WFH environments are as sturdy and resilient as possible:
Making employee connection as easy as it once was with in-house employees
Employees interacting with each other sharing their experiences are a source of information and learning. This should be made simple with just one or two clicks. They should be able to ask for help in solving customer issues.
Highly successful WFH leaders use dedicated chat rooms at minimum. Even better are all-in-one platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and Slack. The platforms create immense visibility and sense of team that sometimes is even better than the physical office environment could ever deliver.
Businesses are social organizations, so making that work in distributed environments is critical. Forming an employee action committee to develop activities (within budget) is a best practice, and sure to be reflective of employee interests.
Stepping up flexibility to create ‘new’ balance for people
Hiring new employees is costly and difficult in this pandemic. Organizations now are trading their rigid work rules for flexible and better options.
These work rules are designed to take some pressure off their employees. If an employee is late to work, not a problem; add the time on to the end of the work schedule. Need a schedule adjustment for a month due to child care challenges? We will make that happen. Want to work on a special project that’s been posted? We’re segmenting parts of work schedules for temporary assignments, special projects, and professional development opportunities. Need to work split shifts or part-time for a while? We will look at ways to do that.
It may cost more to make the environment more flexible, but it is far less costly than losing seasoned employees and incurring the cost of replacing them.
Connect people’s individual roles with a sense of purpose and company vision
Now is a good time to remind employees of the impact of their roles, and contributions to their organizations and the community at large. Individual values, team values, organizational purpose — all are of high importance to many employees. Refreshing this messaging and speaking to new ways in which your organization will be aligning with the larger community to enrich lives and future generations will be thoroughly embraced.
We’ve patched things together in this past year to make distance work function. Now, let’s invest in best practices to make sure our employees and our organization thrive.
[box type=”shadow” align=”” class=”” width=””]About ZRG
Founded in 1994, ZRG International is an ICT solutions company with a major focus on customer interaction technologies and solutions. We offer experience and innovation to help businesses manage customer relationship and achieve higher customer satisfaction and increased profitability.
ZRG has a proven track record of introducing innovations and exciting new possibilities in the customer communication areas. Our line of solutions cover all aspects of customer communication including customer contact center, CRM application suite, quality assurance suite, call center management tools, self-service automation tools, campaign management and teleconferencing. Our solutions are deployed at mission critical contact centers that are being used to provide information, assistance and services to millions of users each day through live agent and self-service based applications.
ZRG has an experienced and knowledgeable team capable of quickly designing and adding tailor-made features in our solutions for site-specific requirements. By using open standards systems, specifications and protocols, we ensure maximum flexibility and future growth of our solutions. We use innovative techniques to deliver latest features and integration capabilities in a most cost-effective manner. Our deployment team has successfully completed all our projects well before the deadlines.
Every day, on every project, we deliver value through our accumulated technical knowledge and project management skills. Our expertise delivers immediate benefits to our clients with cost and time savings. Our solution delivers increased operational efficiency and staff productivity to our valued clients. This is what we do. We deliver beyond expectations.[/box]