As of March 19, 2020, there were over 200,000 cases of COVID-19 worldwide. This global pandemic has caused many countries to promote social isolation. The implication for the American business is encouraging its workers to take their jobs home and telecommute for the next few months. One side effect is that managers are scrambling to change business processes so they will fit telecommuting.

How to Adapt to the Global Crisis

If you want to keep your business flexible during this international crisis, take time to craft a strategy for your workforce, such as rethinking how to align resources. When you transition workers to WAH (working at home), you could be giving them different duties, but at least they will have a way to earn a living. Multiple examples of businesses adapting to social distancing come from China, which had the first COVID outbreak. In China, some businesses early on in the crisis arranged to reutilize employees displaced from restaurants and hotels to work on recovery planning or to be temporarily loaned out to other companies, such as a new grocery service. Other examples are shifting employees who used to work in stores or offices to providing services via virtual chat, telephone, mobile service, or curbside delivery. You can route customers creatively to a remote workforce if you prioritize business transactions and redistribute tasks. Furthermore, managers and employees can provide training on new skills or tasks to other employees over video conferencing.

Maintaining Business Resilience

We know that every business wants to maintain its resilience so it can survive. That’s why we’ve created these 5 tips for managing telecommuting staff until the public health crisis subsides:

  • Have employees access their usual software applications through their home device or a company laptop using a remote desktop server. This will ensure all your company’s applications stay protected behind the firewall of your virtual private network or hosted cloud.
  • Hold virtual meetings with each work team daily to discuss priorities, give information updates, and offer morale-boosting activities.
  • Ask each employee to use a time tracking tool such as Timeclock.io, which logs their hours wherever they are working. Other tools such as Toggl will let them track their time spent on specific projects or client accounts while telecommuting.
  • Let employees suggest ways to keep delivering products or services to clients such as setting up a mobile service or clients picking up what they need from an outdoor kiosk next to your existing business location.
  • Work with employees to create their own home office schedule including independent working hours and office hours when they will service clients so they can accommodate their families.
Keep It Positive

The most important thing that a business leader like you can do is use your soft skills in daily business to communicate care, compassion, empathy, and appreciation to your workers and clients. Everyone is feeling displaced by this crisis and having to make major adjustments to their daily schedules. This starts with slowing down the business strategy process enough to make decisions that are feasible to implement, then rolling out the decisions to your staff, and giving them time to process their new expectations before expecting results. Working at home will not be an easy shift for many workers, but, over a couple of weeks, your management team will slowly work out the kinks. Employees need their leaders to believe in them and provide encouragement without giving in to panic or worry. You and your employees can pull together in a new remote working culture and keep your organization resilient and profitable.

Learn More About Managing Your Telecommuting Staff

We are here to offer our assistance during this difficult time to our valued clients. For details, contact us today.