The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every business in every industry. While many organizations have been forced to close their doors, others have had to adapt their operations.
Both small and large businesses have moved away from the office and embraced working from home for the foreseeable future.
If your business is struggling with the new approach, you might need to make various adjustments to your processes or embrace different technologies. Find out how your business can thrive in 2021.
Survey Your Employees
Your employees might have various opinions about remote working. It is important to listen to their feedback to pinpoint issues and improve their working life. Before you invest in tools and technologies to solve problems that don’t exist, you should survey your employees to make the appropriate changes. For example, they might require greater flexibility to care for their children, or they might be struggling with poor-performing computers or inadequate software.
Support Team Communication
As you will know, team communication is essential when running a business. It can prevent missed deadlines, frustrated clients, or employee conflict. However, this might seem like a difficult feat when working from home.
Rather than allowing collaboration, productivity, and creativity to fall by the wayside, embrace technologies to support team communication. For example, you could invest in an open-source, self-hostable online chat service, which includes file sharing and helps companies maintain privacy.
While Slack is one of the most well-known business communication platforms available, there are better tools on the market. For instance, if you look at Mattermost vs Slack, you’ll find Mattermost reigns supreme for control, privacy, and compliance, which is ideal for remote working teams. Plus, unlike Slack, it includes unlimited UI and UX customizations, white labelling, advanced access controls, data loss prevention, and much more.
Improve Data Security
Remote working can pose a real threat to your company’s sensitive data, accounts, and finances. As your employees will access your files from various networks and devices, it could increase your business’s risk of a data breach.
Due to many businesses’ quick response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are struggling with large cybersecurity gaps that have increased their vulnerability. As a result, cybersecurity incidents have grown in the past year. What’s more, remote workers are reportedly responsible for 20% of security breaches.
It’s for this reason why you must introduce clear cybersecurity policies for your remote workers to follow each day. Plus, you could strengthen your business cybersecurity by providing:
- Cybersecurity training
- Investing in endpoint protection for employee devices
- Restricting access to critical data
- Purchasing cloud services
- Using a password manager
Make Time for Small Talk
As every minute matters in business, senior management might be eager to tell an employee what tasks they must complete before jumping off a call. However, it’s important to maintain a rapport with your team and take an interest in their personal and working lives.
As your employees might not have much face-to-face communication, your call might be the only friendly interaction they have all day. Taking the time to learn about your employees’ lives and problems could make them feel appreciated and valued while supporting their wellbeing. It could prevent your staff from developing mental health conditions, and it might improve workplace productivity and employee morale.
