The global pandemic has affected every aspect of day-to-day life, including how we work. If you are a business owner, then you are no doubt already familiar with the multitude of challenges that this pandemic has brought about for you and your employees. The most difficult aspect of the pandemic to navigate as a business is how to optimize work when your company is working from home. Without an office space as a home base for work to take place and serve as a collaborative and social environment employee, there are obviously a lot of challenges to overcome. Here are the top three challenges you need to address at your business when working from home.
Retaining Your Company Culture
You may find that when working from home, your employees are less exposed to and involved in the company culture that you worked so hard to cultivate in your office. Without the atmosphere of your office and the ability to interact with workers in person on a weekly and daily basis, your company culture may feel impossible to maintain. IT may be difficult, but it is certainly not impossible. What you should try to do is stay involved and communicative with your employees, as well as do things like send care packages, host digital events, send more emails, and try to schedule zoom meetings with your employees to check in on the them and stay involved.
Data Security
With so many people working from home, using laptops, and having to rely on the internet to share and send data and information between employees, you should rightfully be more concerned about data security than you were before work from home was the standard. You need to provide employees the right tools to protect company data if they work from home. You can’t just expect your data security to remain the same. Make sure you work with data professionals to figure out solutions to your data security concerns when your business is working from home.
Cultivating a Work/Life Balance
The last challenge that you need to work on when having your employees work from home is finding ways to encourage your employees to retain and maintain a work/life balance. When working from home, it can be difficult for employees (and employers) to separate working hours from non-working hours and stick to it. Set standards for your employees that they are not expected to respond to work emails after say 6pm, and that they can turn off their notifications for work apps during non-work hours. This will help employees keep a work/life balance when work infiltrates their home.
There are quite a few challenges that your business needs to overcome in a work from home situation. Take a close look at what problems you’re experiencing at the moment. It’s important to work with your employees to create a functional and successful business regardless of where the work is getting done!
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