In September 2020, around eight months after the first of three national lockdowns, 57% of British employees confirmed that they want to be able to continue working from home. Many would prefer a blend of office working and working from the spare bedroom office (or dining room table) but ultimately, working from home offers flexibility and comfort.
However, there is the issue of motivation when you’re not able to see your employees and so you’ll still need to come up with new and innovative ways of keeping your team motivated and happy.
Navigating issues such as homeschooling and living with housemates while trying to deal with sensitive work subjects can be tricky. But hopefully, as the country starts to open up again in May, we’ll see a shift towards a hybrid working from home approach.
For now, here are some ways of keeping your employees motivated as we navigate through this (hopefully!) final lockdown.
Check in regularly
In a survey conducted by Microsoft, 65% of people stated that the thing they missed most while working from home was socialising. We once spent 40 hours of our week in the office, building relationships with people from all walks of life.
Now, some of us are spending our days chatting to the cat in between calls or trying to juggle getting a toddler to potty train while creating a spreadsheet. This is why, as an employer, you should be encouraging social time.
Book in regular catch-ups with your team, to ask them how they are and to continue building those relationships.
Encourage team members who live close to one another to meet for a socially distanced walk or to reach out to someone in another department that they’ve perhaps not spoken to for a long time.
Encouraging socialising allows people to work more closely together, reduces loneliness and can help keep your company culture alive.
Ensure they have a comfortable set up
People are more motivated and work more efficiently when they have what they need to get the job done.
This means, ensuring people have comfortable chairs, a desk and a working laptop and a second screen. It’s a good idea to carry out a risk assessment, ensuring people’s desks are at the right height and there is no impact on their posture or strain on wrists and necks.
If you find that people’s setups aren’t right, you’ll then need to rectify this by paying out for better desks, replacing office chair castor wheels with practical solutions from the likes of Tente and ensuring screens are placed at the right levels.
It’s a little fiddly but if you have a HR department, it’s essential that they’re clued in on these issues. You’ll find guidance on risk assessments online that can help you check in with employees to ensure they stay motivated and happy.
Continue to reward a job well done
Maybe you had an employee of the month award or targets that the team needed to meet to win a prize. There’s no need for these things to stop while working from home – you can simply have those prizes delivered straight to their door!
Ensure your employees still get to enjoy the benefits of working for you, even if they don’t have access to the office table tennis or dartboard, right now.