Talk about a crisis to make people look at remote work as a legitimate way to do things!
My name is Jo Palmer, and I am the founder of Pointer Remote Roles; a remote workforce solutions company.
Firstly, I hope everyone is healthy and safe and being considerate of others in this time of confusion and high-stress. I also hope everyone has transitioned into remote working as best they can.
Of course with this mad rush to ‘go remote,’ there are some serious considerations that business owners and managers need to take into account.
There are a few things we all need to consider right now:
1. Work Health and Safety implications for your team. Bosses and managers are still responsible for the safety of their staff, even when they work from home. We need to ensure that workspaces are safe so you don’t have Workcover come knocking if there is an incident. We recommend having a WHS Audit of home offices. If you need assistance, we can help organise these at Pointer.
2. Collaboration and communication. If you’re used to being in the office, incidental collaboration and communication usually happens in person. This does not automatically transfer to the virtual world. Collaboration and communication take effort, consideration and negotiation when done remotely. You need to come up with a Remote Communication Strategy or Policy so everyone is on the same page. We can also help with this.
3. Culture and inclusion. Maintaining (or completely reshaping) your company culture needs to be front of mind when working in a distributed team. Regular check-ins to ensure everyone is feeling supported is vital. Boundaries around work expectations need to be set and there also needs to be a huge amount of consideration, patience and understanding being demonstrated throughout your organisation. Many will be working with kids at home or other caring responsibilities, so take it easy on your team and ensure that you are showing empathy. (Unfortunately, we can’t help with empathy)
We run a completely remote team and have done since conception. We talk ‘remote’ all day every day and we are working with individual organisations on all levels and stages of becoming distributed, so reach out if we can help.
By Jo Palmer