It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has entirely transformed the way people work. For those in essential retail, they are still having some face-to-face contact with staff and customers. However, for office workers, their whole life has been working from home for the past year or so – and, it’ll be like this for the foreseeable future too. It can be very difficult to work from home, especially when you’re trying to juggle family life, health and work.
With that being said, business owners and managers should do all they can to maintain employee morale when working from home. Keep reading to find out how you can make things a whole lot easier and more enjoyable for your team in 2021 and beyond.
Maintain communication
One of the most important things you can do as a manager or business owner is to maintain contact with your employees or team as a whole. There is nothing worse than needing help and not being able to access any support networks or not being set the right tasks each day. This is why you need to use a coherent system to ensure continuous communication with your employees. To do this, you can conduct weekly or daily meetings on various digital platforms such as Zoom, Skype and so on. Or, you can create a chat for the team you manage. If you do this, it’ll allow your team members to stay in contact with you throughout the day and act as a platform for them to voice their concerns.
We also recommend that you take some time to check in with your employees. Simply asking them how they are personally and how they are getting on with work can go a long way!
Invest in team building activities
Secondly, you can also maintain employee morale during COVID-19 by investing in some team building activities. This is a great way to develop teamwork among your employees and also serves as a wonderful way to have fun. More often than not, work is about work only, with no opportunity for bonding or friendship development. However, it is slightly more difficult as an adult to make friends. This is why team building activities are a useful tool to foster work relationships and allow employees to develop better bonds with their teammates.
As well as this, team building has been proven to boost morale and actually encourage employees to work harder and better. In turn, this increases their happiness and lets them have some fun. You don’t even have to think too hard, you can search online and get inspiration. Team Tactics offer loads of virtual team building activities for you to try out. Teambuilding doesn’t need to stop with the pandemic – you can continue it online!
Offer flexible working
Our final and third recommendation is to offer your employees flexible working. When people think about working from home, they normally tend to believe it is a lot easier than heading into the office at 8am each morning. However, this certainly isn’t the case in practice. For instance, the pandemic has meant that schools, nurseries and day-cares have closed completely, leaving parents to care for their children at home while working. This has made the pandemic very difficult for families as it is almost impossible to juggle working from home and family life.
This is why we recommend that you offer your employees the opportunity to have flexible working hours if this is possible. Here, they can choose their hours, take longer lunch breaks and complete the work on their own terms, as long as they get it done.
Overall, if you implement these various measures, you can help boost and maintain employee morale during COVID-19.
Photo credits: coworkinglondon.com