It’s the spooky 👻 season, and many of us are still dealing with the toil and trouble of working from home. While most professionals have started to get used to the new remote-working reality, there are times when the work-anywhere environment can deliver more tricks than treats. 😱
We’re not just talking about the headaches of zoom fatigue and panic you feel when your internet connection goes haywire either. Many businesses are now having to figure out how they can handle the issue of “unprofessional conduct” for people working outside of the office.
After all, adding the wrong backdrop to your Zoom meeting or using a silly filter might be fine when you’re just chatting with colleagues. But that’s also the kind of thing that could lose some companies their clients if team members aren’t careful.
For a while, business leaders brushed remote working issues off as problems that would disappear after the return to the office. However, experts say that there’s no “going back” to the way things were. Now that the spread of the pandemic is beginning to slow, most companies are going to continue with their work-from-home strategies.
So, what does that mean for tomorrow’s teams?
Managing Teams in the Workplace of the Future 🕷️
According to a survey from the Institute of Directors, 74% of companies are continuing with increased work-from-home efforts after COVID-19 restrictions disappear. Over half of the respondents also said that they’re planning to reduce their long-term use of physical workspaces.
Around 4 in every 10 respondents in the study went on to say that working from home is more effective than their previous setup. Another 43% said that they were starting to use flexible working strategies significantly more often.
Despite an overwhelmingly positive response to the idea of working from home, the IoD has warned that increased remote work could cause problems as legal questions arise over employer responsibilities. Specifically, what can team leaders do about staff acting inappropriately outside of a formal office space?
We first got an insight into the kind of problems that remote workers face a few years ago when a man in a live news interview had to handle the headache of his children crashing the conversation behind him. The world-famous clip took the world by storm, and poor Professor Robert Kelly became a cautionary tale for those who forget to lock their door during video meetings:
Streaming Screamers: The Tales of Terror Are Everywhere ⚰️
Of course, it’s not just random disruptions from family members that today’s home workers have to worry about. Getting used to new video technology like virtual backgrounds and filters isn’t always easy, as one business owner discovered first-hand.
A woman shared a recording of her boss accidentally becoming a potato during a Microsoft Teams meeting. Unfortunately, after she noticed her mistake, she couldn’t get rid of the filter and had to conduct the entire conversation as a spud.
Other common problems include:
- Other people walking into your meeting: When your entire family doesn’t know who’s on a video call, there’s always a chance something could go wrong. A woman walked into her son’s room when he was in the middle of a video class at the beginning of October, completely naked. Whoops!
- Forgetting about your outfit: In an attempt to have the best of both worlds, a lot of staff members log into video meetings only dressed for business on the top-half. Unfortunately, when you get up to grab something, you may forget that you aren’t wearing the right clothes on your bottom half. That’s what happened to this poor chap
- Accidentally not ending the meeting: Have you ever thought that you hung up the phone when you didn’t? That kind of thing can lead to some embarrassment if you start talking about the people who are listening in. The same applies to a Zoom video meeting. Say something about a client or co-worker and you’re in a lot of trouble
Can Business Leaders Ensure Professionalism? 💀
These days, video conferencing is the ultimate way to connect with teams. Ever since the pandemic hit the beginning of this year, we’ve switched to video as a way of staying connected to the people who matter. Video offers an extra level of immersion compared to audio or text. With, we can enjoy the face-to-face interactions that human beings crave.
Of course, this new age of video does take some getting used to. After several months of struggling to find the right work-from-home strategy, many businesses are beginning to realise just how important it has to have the right polices in place
While many of the horror stories to arrive from the new at-home working trend have a humorous twist to them, they’re not all fun and games.
Fail to set your employees up with guidelines, expectations, and best-practices on how to behave on video calls, and you risk some real professional nightmares. Companies everywhere are going to have to come to terms on the kind of strategies they can do to ensure professionalism in this new work landscape.
Avoid the Homeworking Nightmare 🎃
The quicker companies begin to implement best practice guidelines for their team members on how to work well from home, the better. Simple steps like locking your home office door before you start a meeting so your partner doesn’t walk in fresh from the shower can make a huge difference.
Employees making the extra effort to get (completely) dressed before they turn on their camera and learning how to use features like filters and backgrounds professionally will help.
Having policies in place that ask your employees to commit to a certain standard of conduct might become an important practice in the years to come. The remote working environment has a lot of positive treats to offer, from reduced office overheads, to better employee engagement.
We just need to get over a few teething problems first. 😬
