Right now, you need reading material more than ever, and our best blogs for March post includes a lot of good stuff, including stories on how to effectively manage a remote team, preparing for the pandemic recovery and virtual job interviews. That’s a lot of great stuff to read while you #StayHome!
Effectively Managing Remote Workers
While working from home has been a growing trend in business over the past decade or so, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it a business necessity. Managers who never had to manage a remote team before are now scrambling to coordinate with their employees over email, chat, text messages, FaceTime and video conferencing.
Whenever you find a break in the day, you should be checking in with your team members, ideally on a one-on-one basis. Personal periodic check-ins not only help your team members stay on track; they can also offset a sense of isolation they can start to creep in.
It’s also important to establish realistic expectations upfront. In the current situation, some of your team members may have childcare and other responsibilities. You need to establish reasonable expectations in light of these unusual circumstances. Of course, you should expect the level of productivity to remain relatively the same. However, when the work gets done is less of a concern. If your team members are better able to work in the early morning, in the evening or on the weekend and they aren’t missing deadlines or aren’t unavailable when you need them — go ahead and let them flex their schedule as need be.
Preparing Your Business for the Recovery
Generally speaking, every crisis is also an opportunity. Even some of the most dire COIVD-19 projections say that life will go back to normal at some point and your company should spend time planning for a post-coronavirus reality. Not only will recovery planning prepare your company for the future, it can also be therapeutic – giving the people in your company something to look forward to for the near future.
All recovery strategies have to include the ways that staff members will communicate and how they will do their jobs. The specifics will vary, based on the size and scale of a business. For some companies, issues like the supply chain will be a major area of focus. For others, data may play a more critical role. The recovery plan must speak to both immediate needs, but also opportunity.
Conducting a Virtual Job Interview
A lot of life has shifted on-line and the job interview is no exception. Since everyone expects life to go on eventually, employees still have to be hired. However, pandemic restrictions and common sense tell us that bringing in candidates to shake hands and sit down face-to-face just isn’t a good idea.
In case you didn’t know, companies have been using video interviews effectively for years now. The success of this approach is based on establishing a solid process using proven video conferencing tools, such as Zoom and Google Hangouts.
