Business leaders can agree that last year has marked a turning point in the work from home trend. Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, remote work had gained some considerable traction. Yet, in 2020, it became the norm for millions of employees across the globe. Providing some remote working tips and strategies for employees and leaders alike has become paramount. And this is especially true for those that didn’t have remote work in place before.
Company values are the core set of principles that your company stands by and promotes. Some might think these are just a bunch of nice-sounding slogans or a marketing stunt meant to attract customers. But when you stand by your values and place them at the core of your business, they can act as a guide for your employees in those unpredictable situations that aren’t mapped by your set of procedures.
Procedures are a well-established set of rules that let people know how they should behave in certain situations. These are in place to make the workflow predictable, the operations quicker, and the overall business more effective. However, you can’t possibly have rules for any possible situation, and you must make sure that your employees make the best decisions in those unpredictable situations. Therefore, both values and procedures are important for the prosperity of your business.
If there’s one lesson the pandemic taught business owners this year, it’s that having a virtual workforce is doable across many industries and sectors. About 50 percent of surveyed companies in the United States and Canada think their employees are more productive when working from home and project this will continue in 2021, according to Talent Trends.
However, the research also indicates that another 43 percent of companies are not sure if they can adapt to a digitally enabled remote work entirely in the months ahead.
This year threw the workforce for a major loop, as millions of people exchanged office cubicles for their own sofas and kitchen tables. And while this shift in daily scenery is one thing for existing employees, for new team members there’s a different story altogether. In a matter of months, remote onboarding has become an even hotter topic.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working has become more and more widespread. According to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work survey, at the beginning of this year, 62 percent of full-time employees in US worked remotely to some degree. By now, more than 65 percent are mostly working from home. And the already fragile work-life balance is once again under great pressure. Therefore, avoiding burnout and caring for the mental health of their employees have become paramount for companies from all over the world.
For the past half of the year, the economy has been revolving around virtual teams more than ever before. With lockdown measures in place, the only way for companies and workers all over the world to keep their jobs and their business going was switching to virtual spaces. Adjusting to this new way of working hasn’t been easy for anyone. And it has been particularly challenging for those who were doing it for the first time.
This article is coming to give a helping hand to those team leaders, managers, and workers who are trying to make their virtual teams work and prosper during these strange times.
We can all agree that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything in the way we live, socialize, interact, communicate, and work. With a majority of companies moving away from the offices, nothing took a greater hit than organizational culture.
At the beginning of 2020, an estimated 62 percent of full-time employees in the United States worked remotely at least to some degree, according to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work survey. That number steeply increased in the wake of COVID-19. This escalation in working offsite requires the use of virtual communication tools to keep teams on the same page, despite shifts in workflow and location.
If your morning routine is never complete without your daily cup of coffee, then you are not alone, not even close. Around the world, it’s a $100 billion industry. A whopping 500 million cups of this caffeinated beverage are consumed each year, according to globalEDGE.
We’ve been talking a lot about working from home during this climate of uncertainty and the challenges it brings. And we’ve analyzed the efforts we’re all putting in order to overcome these issues while building a new normality. To accomplish this, we need to find new ways to keep our work productivity up, even after the rules of the game have been unexpectedly changed overnight due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
