Points for HR Teams to Manage Employees Checklist for Remote Work

Remote working has become a necessary model to adapt in each company, big or small, ever since the pandemic hit this world.
While companies are managing to pull on the business in pandemic times, it is on the shoulders of the HR team to streamline the entire thing.

The employee checklist goes far beyond the regular day-to-day activities.

Prominent Challenges in Creating a Remote Work Model:

More than 27% of employees have agreed to struggle while working from home. Some of the other main challenges faced by employees while working from include:

• More than 48% of the employees feel micromanaged while working from home than when working from the office.
• More than 90% of the professionals are optimistic about working from home to recommend it to their friends. The only issues lie in the communication and management’s attitude.
• More than 19% of the remote working employees struggle with the issues of loneliness while working.

With all the issues caused due to the new work from home concept, it is apparent that we need the immediate involvement of management. Human resource management understands human engineering during such challenging times. And perhaps, HR is the only one who can pump in great energies and positivity in adverse situations.

But here’s how the HR team can help employees create a checklist to work best remotely. HR members need to take care of four essential aspects while preparing an employees checklist:

Employee’s Checklist in a Remote Work Model:

• Communication: Can employees communicate smoothly within teams and with customers?
• Security: How safe is it to access all company information while employees are working from home? How is the employee’s data protected?
• Working Hours: How can employees ensure to unplug in the remote work model?
• Engagement: How can employees engage themselves in the remote working model?

How Can HR Team Help Employees Checklist in Remote Work Model?

Companies need to help their employees in transitioning to do better in the remote work models. Your HR team can help your employees by understanding and resolving the following issues:

1. Communication:

Distance usually creates issues in communication. So, the top-most priority of any HR team should be making a channel for effective communication. More than 20% of work from home employees consider communication as the most critical issue.

How to Resolve?

The HR team can incorporate multiple channel communication protocols to keep employees connected. You can start using instant messaging apps, setting email response protocols, etc.

Companies can invest in online HR software or communication tools to ensure that distances can’t affect daily interactions. The choice of platforms for communication further helps create a distant inter-team and intra-team communication setup.

2. Security Risks:

More than 54% of IT professionals risk data leaks and similar issues when teams work remotely.

How to Resolve?

The HR team must ensure that employees can access all tools and technologies while working from home. Such devices must use centralized security features that eliminate possible chances of data leakage.

The employees’ information and company assets are crucial steps for any employee’s checklist. HR can include e-signatures or legal documentation tools to prevent any data breach occurrences. Thus, you can overcome all possible security risks by using centralized remote working tools. Tools like these give great ROIs for any organization.

3. Work Hours:

More than 23% of professionals working from home believe that they’re working for long hours compared to working from the office.

How to Resolve?

As an HR member, you can decide the expectations of each employee by working with the team managers and the HODs.

Since the remote work regime is still new, employees struggle to juggle personal space and workspace. The team can thus work effectively in handling the regular workload without getting stuck anywhere.

The HR team can encourage employees to only work according to the regular working hours. The defined expectations further help employees strike the perfect work-life balance.

4. Engaging Teams:

Professional loneliness is on the rise due to remote work. Employees are not able to communicate with their colleagues like they used to do during break times.

How to Resolve?

HR needs to implement online employee engagement activities to enliven the moods of employees regularly.

Taking the help conferencing video calling tools, HR teams can help employees interact and engage internally online. HR can conduct themed discussions and games that are a fun way to learn new things.

Such online employee engagement activities will help flush out any possible negativity arising out of the current situation. Games, quizzes, online discussions, etc., can take the virtual retreat day to another level.

Employees Checklist for Members Working With Customers Remotely

HR teams have to put up extra efforts while boosting the morale of customer representatives who are managing calls now from their homes. Customer support teams are the helpers/healers of any organization.

Hence, they need constant revisions of their social abilities adapting the pandemic times to help customers with their issues and problems. The best possible ways to improve customer service skills remotely include:

1. Switching to cloud-based tools:

Email communication lacks management when team members are working from different places. HR teams can hence introduce cloud-based customer service tools.

It allows the customer support team to centralize all information and communication for a compelling user experience for every customer. HR teams can further overlook all the ongoing issues that the representatives might face to help them in distress.

2. Creating a Networked Knowledge Base:

A centralized knowledge base for the customer service team can help agents serve customers better. There may be large volumes of similar queries that are best resolved using this shared database.

3. Training:

It is crucial to make your customer support agents stay updated with their customer profiles and relevant communication. You can conduct specialized training to make them clear about the profiles of the audience. It is essential to serve customers better irrespective of cultural differences.

4. Using Video Meetings:

Video meetings have an average attention span of 35 minutes compared to 23 minutes of phone calls. Thus, HR teams can promote consistent video meetings that help the customer service team discuss urgent issues. The video recordings of such sessions can further help in training other employees facing the same problem. Customer service managers can also conduct virtual meetings to ensure a streamlined flow of information among the team.

5. Uniting the Team Online Regularly:

Whenever managers need to unite each employee from the department, HR can help connect the teams to avoid colossal virtual chaos. HR teams can help create scheduled discussions, report analyses, presentations, etc., over time.

Wrapping Up

It is all about managing productivity and human capital! Work from home is here to stay for a long time.

The HR team can help businesses with these much-needed strategies to fill the gap between employers and employees working remotely. You can guide your HR team members to ensure effective communication, grievance handling, and managing employees’ checklists while they’re working from home.

Enabling technology adaptation through different phases of this pandemic can help the HR team keep a company function smoothly. With more than 90% of the working from home employees agreeing to continue work from home only, the HR teams need to buckle up.

Did we miss out on any critical points? Let us know in the comments below about which issue should be added to the checklist.