Your team may be working remotely by now, and you've had some time to assess the results and how things are going in general. How did you alter your staff? What are you doing currently to ensure that your staffs remain engaged and productive? In the next months, what adjustments do you need to make? Here are a few ideas to increase your productivity and to ensure that our staffs work at a distance.

Employees' work habits have been thrown off. Now that employees are geographically separated, employers must discover new strategies to keep them motivated, engaged, and productive.

COVID-19 has a significant influence on how work is done, with long-term ramifications for businesses and employees. Some firms have discovered that their employees may be just as productive outside of the workplace as they are inside. As a result, it becomes increasingly probable that we will witness a faster movement toward more agile working practises.

Employees are the public face of every company. The work velocity is broken by even minor changes in the working procedure. While small adjustments may be simpler to manage and overcome, a scenario like COVID-19 necessitates a lot more preparation and acclimating to different working methods.

Why do you need to keep the employees connected?

Organizations must place a special emphasis on healing employees' emotions and confidence during and after the crisis in order to retain productivity and employee engagement. Open communication in the workplace, management assistance, leadership, HR, internal communications, and remote working settings are just a few of the requirements for assuring employee productivity and corporate success.

In order to keep workers connected and engaged, leaders, managers, and internal communications experts play a critical role. The pandemic's influence on employees' personal, social, and professional life has been enormous. Anxiety, irritation, and low staff morale are all symptoms of overwhelming anxieties about health, safety, and job instability.

If employers do not discover solutions to address these issues, employees' incentive to work will be broken, resulting in low productivity, poor work quality, and a negative influence on the organization's capacity to function successfully through and after tough times.

Focus on the health of the employees

Employers' concern for their employees' health, safety, and well-being is more evident than ever before. Organizations must devote more resources to these areas in order to foster employee trust and maintain high levels of motivation and morale. Also send them goodies. You can also send them custom labels on water bottles to make them feel connected.

With just 47% of executives feeling "extremely confident" in their abilities to manage their employees' well-being and morale, it's critical that companies continue to assist their workers and understand their unique problems.

Build continuity plan

The productivity of your staff is determined by how effectively you are prepared to handle and respond to a crisis. As a result, many businesses will look back on 2020 as the year of business continuity planning. You and your entire office will be unsure how to get back to business as normal if you don't have it.

Develop a comprehensive workforce strategy and action plan that prioritises people. However, having a plan is useless unless you have a method for delivering and communicating it to your own personnel.

Keep it social

Many businesses are revisiting their underlying beliefs and corporate cultures. People who aren't used to being "socially isolated." This is why cultural and sociological problems associated to the present trend of forced teleworking on a scale we have never seen before may interrupt your employees' productivity.

The way leaders, managers, and businesses as a whole support and connect their people will have a significant influence on business culture and employee experience.

Employees need an easy method to interact and cooperate with their colleagues and superiors now more than ever. To increase employee productivity and performance, leaders and internal communications specialists must lead the shift toward more open and transparent workplaces.

Because trust and openness in the workplace are two of the most sought-after qualities among employees, they not only affect employee productivity, but also help businesses recruit and retain talent.

Listen actively

Employees who do not feel heard are less likely to be driven to perform a good job and go above and beyond. This is especially true now, when employees have a lot of issues and want empathy from their bosses.

This is why we see businesses doing frequent employee surveys and adopting technology that facilitates two-way communication in the workplace more than ever before.

As a result, the days of sending out email updates and announcements to the whole workforce are long gone. Not only is such a communication strategy ineffective, but it may also result in employees missing crucial pandemic information.

Keep your employees informed

Organizations have realised the value of communication throughout this crisis by now. Many employers alter their company's operations and working practises on a weekly or even daily basis. This isn't going away anytime soon since we still don't know what the pandemic's future holds. Furthermore, fresh waves are predicted to emerge, compelling companies to adhere to tight social distancing guidelines once more.

All of these internal adjustments, as well as critical pandemic-related information and safety advice, must be delivered to staff in a timely and personal manner.

Inform the effective way of working

In virtual organisations, the author of the Gallup article COVID-19 Has My Teams Working Remotely: A Guide for Leaders emphasises the significance of improved leadership and management communication.

Employees who are accustomed to a brief discussion with their supervisor risk losing their concentration, engagement, and motivation if they are not able to do so on a daily basis. In a period of uncertainty and rapid change, leaders have been pushed to think about how to engage and inspire their people.

Keep them connected

According to a Gallup research, 74 percent of employees felt disconnected at work and believed they were losing out on crucial corporate information and news, demonstrating how pervasive unhappiness with workplace communication is.

When it happens every now and again, feeling detached may not seem like such a huge deal. However, given that remote work is the new normal, this might provide a significant barrier for businesses that have yet to figure out how to keep their staff connected and cooperate successfully. Employee productivity will decrease as a result.

Conclusion

Many businesses were concerned about how remote work might affect their workers' productivity, however this was not the case. Prior to the coronavirus epidemic, most companies did not have a substantial proportion of employees working from home, according to this poll. Before COVID-19, 56 percent reported less than 10% of their staff worked from home.

According to the same study, at least 75% of employees at surveyed organisations now work from home. This new tendency, however, has had little impact on staff productivity.