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Ensuring Performance and Productivity of Work from Home Employees

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Ensuring Performance and Productivity of Work from Home Employees

The pandemic might have gone away, but working from home might stay in a significant way for many organizations. Organizations are thus concerned about the performance and productivity of work-from-home employees, especially if it becomes the new normal.

Why are Organizations concerned about the Performance and Productivity of ‘Work from Home’ Employees?

Work from Home Employees

For most organizations and their supervisors, ‘work from home’ is an unknown and untested concept.

They have rarely been exposed to the concept of employees working in isolation every day, interacting with team members only digitally.

This discomfort about the current situation raised their concerns about the performance and productivity of their team members.

How to Ensure Performance and Productivity of Work from Home Employees?

When handled in the right way, work from home can even prove a blessing in disguise for most organizations.

Organizations can manage the performance and productivity of ‘work from home’ employees without using intrusive monitoring tools and technology.

Here are a few tips that can help organizations maintain employee performance and productivity while they are working from home:

How to Ensure Performance and Productivity of Work from Home Employees?

1. Build Trust

Trust

Organizations should create an environment of trust with their employees working from home.

This requires supervisors to assign work to employees and trust them to fulfill the same within stipulated timelines.  

Supervisors need to monitor the performance of their team members and ensure completion of the tasks/ projects assigned.

However, they should avoid monitoring and managing their team members continuously.

Employees should be made accountable for the completion of the work and not for the utilization of their time.

2. Communicate Clearly

Communication

Effective communication plays a key role in boosting the efficiency and performance of employees especially when they are working from home.

This minimizes the chances of any miscommunication and avoids errors and rework.

Also, open and clear lines of communication between supervisors and WFH employees can help them get the necessary support.

It also facilitates the instant sharing of data and information that might be required to accomplish the task at hand.

Over-communication, on the other hand, might prove counterproductive and result in lower productivity.

3. Provide the Right Tools

Digital Tools

The productivity of employees may suffer without access to the right tools and technology for performing their tasks.

Hence, organizations need to make sure that their remote-working employees have proper access to these tools.  

This would include computers/ laptops, installed with the proper software including communication and conferencing tools.

Organizations should also try to offer remote technical support for their work from employees.

They can also provide stable internet connections as per their needs and even work-from-home furniture if required.

4. Offer Flexible Timings

Flexible Timings

While working from home might be beneficial for some employees, it might also be a challenge for others.

These employees need to constantly shuffle between various professional and personal responsibilities.

Hence, a flexible work schedule might prove beneficial for boosting the productivity of the employees.

While deadlines might not change, flexible work timings can help employees balance between work from home and work at home.

5. Establish Realistic Goals

Goals

common mistake made by most organizations is to burden WFH employees with unrealistic goals and low-priority tasks. 

Organizations often believe that assigning employees enough tasks ‘to fill the time’ will result in higher productivity.

However, this can prove counterproductive as the employees may feel overburdened with work and underperform on the actual business goals.

6. Regular Coaching and Mentoring

Mentoring

Work-from-home employees need regular help and support from their supervisors and other team members.

Hence, it is important for supervisors to coach and mentor team members working from home.

They need to set aside some time regularly for this.

Bottom-line

Work from home’ can be a double-edged sword for many organizations. However, if managed properly the performance and productivity of ‘work from home’ employees can be maintained at reasonably high levels.

Sagar Chaudhuri

Lead author: Sagar Chaudhuri, the Co-Founder and CEO of HiFives. He is an HR Tech Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in the corporate world and entrepreneurship. In the past, Sagar has worked with companies such as Genpact, Infosys, and ICICI Bank, in leadership roles. He has an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and an MBA from IIM Lucknow. Connect on LinkedIn

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HiFives is a global employee rewards, recognition and engagement SaaS platform that enables organizations to digitize, automate and transform their employee experience. It is used by 100+ large enterprises, small businesses and startups in manufacturing, retail, technology, financial services and media, across 25+ countries.