Managing Your Employees When They Work from Home
Marketing is a challenging and rewarding career. Clients place their faith, confidence, and money within you and your firm’s control. Marketing design is critical to success. All your employees must be actively engaged in the pursuit of marketing success for all your clients. Marketing communication begins internally with your staff before any effective communication can take place with your clients. Managing your employees successfully when they work from home must be done right to ensure favourable outcomes. Here are some tips that may help.
If remote employees can’t download files, struggle hearing on a conference call, and consistently receive meeting invitations for times when they are still asleep, you have failed to address the basics. First, invest in reliable tools to make collaboration possible. Then develop clear processes to use such tools.
Check-in frequently (daily) using collaboration tools, shared docs and spreadsheets, phone calls, chat, and video to invest in the relationship. Show you are supportive of their success by using inquiry to help them achieve their goals rather than check on their progress and numbers.
Sometimes, companies are not willing to embrace a remote workforce because there’s uncertainty about whether or not the work will get completed at the same level as if they were in the office. To combat this belief, set up work-from-home guidelines, such as emails must be responded to within 24 hours, use text for urgent matters, and no calls between certain hours to make sure teammates are not working around the clock.
Everyone has a different idea of what doing something “quickly” or “well” means. Whether showing examples of what you expect to be done, calendar sharing, etc., make sure you have clear expectations from those you work with online. The more prepared they are, the better they can serve.
Remote workers are often frozen out of regular-office human interaction, so on-target over communication is critical. Help them get aligned with the mission, the values that truly matter to them, as well as the outcomes they love delivering to others and their natural role in any situation. This will keep them truly motivated and working with you longer and more productively.
Figure out how to avoid multi-tasking. Video conferences instead of phone conferences work well. Encourage people to stay in working mode and off email back-and-forth as much as is reasonable. Email trails with extensive “reply all” can be stifling on productivity. Send a note to whoever needs it, but send it early in the day!
Treat your remote people like they are local and treat your local people like they are remote. Give remote people as much access to you as possible. Remember, your local people see you in the halls, eat with you at lunch, stop by your office, etc. The remote people don’t have that access and can feel distant. Respond to them as quickly as possible. Make your local people set appointments.
It’s incumbent, especially with virtual employees, to schedule a time and look at one another when you’re speaking. Use Zoom or some other video conferencing tool to work with your clients and your employees. If you do not schedule time or talk with one another and hopefully face to face, silence becomes very loud and dangerous, as remote employees might end up wondering how they’re doing.
It is important to manage expectations and stay focused on goals when embracing a remote workforce. Don’t worry as much about what is being done. Instead, concentrate on what is being accomplished. If we are meeting our goals, then great. If not, we need to investigate the situation further. It is all about accomplishment, not activity.
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