May 12, 2020
Does your organization have a clearly understood roadmap for enforcing work-from-home policy and enabling compliance?
In many countries, governments are mandating unprecedented measures to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. National-level remote-work orders are disrupting the familiar workflow of the traditional office environment. Execs are confronting profound challenges as they navigate this difficult but necessary transition into an uncertain future.
With so many workers logging into offices virtually, many managers find themselves tasked with developing and enforcing new policies to maintain workforce productivity in these virtual offices. When teams switch to remote work, managers need to design new communication norms that fit their new context.
Communication could be the single biggest secret to your organization’s success. In the midst of the pandemic, employees need to know exactly what they are expected to do, when they should be finished and—if the situation is a dynamically evolving one—how they are expected to do it.
Ideally, that culture of communication starts from the top. Executives can demonstrate leadership by articulating and endorsing the organization’s official statement in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Managers are then better able to invest effort in ensuring that their teams understand clearly how organizational priorities connect to individual team members’ responsibilities.
Of course, informal communication can also contribute to peer-level positive reinforcement of compliant behaviors. In the old paradigm, workers could pop by a manager’s offices to clarify expectations over coffee. Small groups taking water breaks by the cooler could help with each other understand what’s happening on their teams. Therefore, managers should expect to make and receive more voice and video calls than normal, especially in the initial stages of their team’s transition from in-person to online work.
Tools like Microsoft Teams can be valuable to your organization at this time. Microsoft Teams acts as a virtual hub for your software-assisted productivity environment, allowing organizations of virtually any size to group chat, voice call, video conference, and work collaboratively, all in one place. Experts say video conferencing while working from home helps fight isolation while enhancing team unity and productivity.
Managers going the extra mile to effectively manage their employees virtually may hone skills and develop habits with benefits that outlast the current crisis.
“If you haven’t used previous experience to prepare for a moment like this, you can certainly use this moment to prepare for future challenges. Some of these changes could become part of the new normal for your organization,” said Jasper Kraak, Solution Architect at Inova.
Jasper will explore these and other insightful perspectives in an upcoming webinar, as part of our ongoing Inova Webinar Series. This event will offer participants real-time understanding of the challenges, solutions and best practices related to data loss prevention.
You can register now for our May 28th webinar on Best Practices for Compliance and Governance in Teams, to learn more about how you can strengthen organizational policy enforcement and enhance your team’s ability to work from home to stay safe from COVID-19. Attendance is free of charge, but registration is required.
Join us on the last Thursday of every month to take part in this series of free expert-led webinars, where we help you empower innovation in your organization. In January, we took an honest look at why we want to eliminate our internal email at Inova. In February, we shared some practical ways you can tell if your team is using your collaboration tools optimally. In March, we focused on how you can optimize your Sales Team. In April, we shared tips for managing virtual offices and remote workers, while protecting your corporate data.
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Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
