Working from home is the “new normal” for many employees today.
Around 1 in 4 people will work from home permanently going forward, according to studies. Plus, many staff members will continue to embrace a “hybrid” strategy that splits office and remote work.
Before the pandemic, many professionals assumed that work from home would be a fun, relaxing, and laid-back experience. However, after a few months of technical difficulties, Zoom fatigue, and feelings of isolation, concerns about the WFH (Work from Home) landscape began to arise.
Now, if companies want their staff to thrive in the workplace of tomorrow, they need to ensure that they have a strategy for continued wellbeing in place. Employees need more than just the right tools and technology to remain productive in the modern world. They need to feel comfortable in their changing workplace too.
Here’s how we can all make remote working more enjoyable.
Create the Right Environments
Working from home is often more difficult when people don’t have access to the right designated space. Having a separate room where you can shut out distractions and focus on your work makes concentration much easier. Every employee should be encouraged to find a space where they can feel comfortable working – even if it’s not a separate room.
Creating a small corner of the living room where an employee doesn’t have to be disturbed by family members could be a good first start. At the same time, staff members should have the freedom to make their space comfortable for them. This could mean adding pictures to the office space or bringing a fresh plant in to place beside your desk.
Once employees choose a designated space, business leaders and IT professionals should be on-hand to help equip that space with the right tools, like conference phones, headphones, microphones, and webcams for video conferencing.
Embrace the Video-First Culture
One of the toughest challenges of working from home, is that employees don’t always feel connected to their colleagues. It’s easy for isolation to set in when you aren’t interacting with other people in a traditional office space. Video conferencing and VCaaS technology could be the solution to this issue. Through video, people can interact face-to-face, and bring more human communication back into the office. The key to success with video conferencing is using it correctly.
Make sure everyone in the team shares video, whether they’re self-conscious or not, so that video can start to feel like a natural part of the company culture. It’s also worth ensuring that your staff members know how to use features like background blur and image touch-up to help them feel more confident in meetings.
Although regular video conferencing is a great way to spark a human connection, it’s also important to give your staff members time away from the camera too. Allow employees to set out periods of time when they won’t be available for video, to reduce feelings of collaboration fatigue.
Experiment with Video Features
As video becomes a more common part of the communication and collaboration environment, vendors are increasingly rolling out more tools to make the experience more fun. Not every video conversation with your team has to be serious. It’s worth setting aside some time in the calendar for people to relax at the end of the day with an informal chat.
In these video sessions, staff should be able to talk about anything they choose – not just work. It’s also worth exploring some different features within the video technology you’re using that can be more fun. For instance, virtual backgrounds can launch employees into space, and filters can transform staff members into potatoes.
Even workplace chats can feel a little more friendly and informal in the right video environments. Using things like Immersive Scenes from Zoom or Together Mode from Microsoft Teams helps people to feel as though they’re sharing the same space.
Schedule Time for Play
Bonding activities are still important in the age of remote work. In fact, it might be even more important to bring your staff members together for periods of play in the age of hybrid work. You could use something like a virtual whiteboard on your video conferencing app to play games like hangman or Pictionary.
Create a plan once a week where one member of staff from your remote team shows everyone else around their “office space” and takes questions. This could make it easier for your employees to feel connected to their colleagues, because they can see how diverse the new working environment has become. There are even plugins and digital solutions that you can use in your collaboration apps for gaming nights.
Make sure that these moments of play are entirely virtual. This will help to prevent remote employees from feeling “left out” with whatever might be happening in the office. When everyone, remote or otherwise, collaborates and communicates over video and web conferencing, it’s easier for everyone to stay on the same page.
Encourage Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance can be a tricky thing to master when you’re working from home. Much to the surprise of some business owners, homeworkers seem to put more hours into their career when they’re working remotely, especially since COVID. When your office and your home are the same place, it’s difficult to close the door on your job at the end of the day.
However, while extra working hours might be good for the business, it’s more likely to cause burnout in employees. Team leaders should be taking steps to improve work/life balance for their staff members, by encouraging them to take regular breaks.
Allow users to access “presence” features on their collaboration apps so they can let other staff members know when they’re not available, as well as when they are. Make sure that everyone understands not to communicate with employees that have already finished work for the day until they come back to work. Calendar apps that work alongside tools like Microsoft Teams will help staff members to organise their days more effectively.
Create a Culture of Wellbeing
It’s tough to enjoy the sensation of working remotely if your mental or physical health is suffering. That’s why it’s so important for business leaders to encourage better self-care during the age of hybrid work. This could mean setting up exercise challenges for your employees, where you invite people to run a certain number of miles per day or burn calories to win points.
Some companies can set up nutritional food deliveries for their staff members, sending them healthy snacks once a month so they’re less likely to binge eat, or over-eat foods that aren’t good for them. Even articles and curated guidance from around the web on how to stay physically healthy can be valuable for a lot of team members.
Business leaders can also encourage more work on mindfulness and mental health too. Employees that practice mindfulness will be more able to collaborate successfully with their colleagues. Mindfulness also encourages us to live in and enjoy the moment. Apps like Headspace or Calm can assist with mindfulness training and meditation.
You can even set up an open-door policy for staff members who might need to talk to someone about issues they’re having with working from home.
Engage in Regular Competition
Finally, playful competition is usually a common part of the workplace environment. But this experience can begin to diminish between remote workers. Employers should be looking for a way to bring contests back into the workspace, particularly if it helps staff to work together. You could partner your remote and in-office workers or put them into teams then give them tasks to complete for a chance to win awards.
The contests and games that you create are a great way to remind your employees of the values that are important to your company. For instance, if you’re a green-first business, you could reward points to employees for all the environmentally friendly things they do each week. If you’re a company that’s trying to prioritize group communication, you could give people awards for participating fully in each meeting you host.
Contests get people excited about all kinds of work and help to drive positive growth among your team members. Just make sure you have something fun in place for your staff to win, and track engagement, so you know your competitions aren’t having the wrong impact.
Have More Fun with Hybrid Work
As we move into the world of work post-COVID, hybrid and remote office environments are sure to continue growing in popularity. With fewer people working together in the same shared space, companies have new challenges to face. Business leaders must ensure that their staff members are empowered to work productively from home. At the same time, you also need to ensure that your employees feel happy and comfortable wherever they are.
Taking the initiative to make working from home more enjoyable will ensure that the hybrid workforce of tomorrow can continue to deliver positive results.
How are you going to keep your staff smiling? Tell us on social media.
More:
How to Monitor and Improve Hybrid Team Wellbeing
Improving Team Collaboration Using Video
