Employee engagement is the corner stone of any collaboration – Part 3

Our second blog we covered employee/manager relationship. Being a multipart series blog, we are covering the 5 major bottlenecks in the work from home environment. In our earlier blog, we addressed point 1 and 2. In this, let’s delve into point 3 and 4.

1. Employee Manager relationships
2. Think tank groups/Discussion forums
3. Line of sight
4. Ask for help
5. Growth & KPI’s

Line of sight –

In an office environment, the line of sight (line of control) is visible. The reason is very simple. Departments helps to group employees. Employees converge in meeting room for project discussions. For casual communication, they catchup with each other during break. In a remote work environment, Line of sight is not visible. The simple way to achieve the same is by two modes

1. You have a platform, where the teams have their own space grouped by department. This helps the employees to feel a sense of relativity as they work in their department workspace. Day to updates through chats, and tasks keeps them connected to know the progress and status update.
2. Planned online breakout sessions with in the department helps them to feel connected. This is similar to the casual communication during break time .

A well established organisation chart helps for the team across the organisation to know about their team members. This transparent structure, can show where they work from, whom they report too.

Ask for help –

The fallout of line of sight, is immediate request for help. In a department, an employee quickly calls the desk of his mentor or his support co.worker for help. Sometimes, they do walk to their desk and seek the help. However in a WFH scenario, this is a stumbling block. As a result, the tasks in hand doesn’t progress. The 3 simple ways to address are

1. Make a simple FAQ repository depending upon employee service requirements. You can always start with basics and can build it over a period of time. A good FAQ repository, makes the employee to quickly search and get the guidance.
2. FAQ BoT – When you have a strong FAQ repository, the employee can chat with a bot to get queries addressed. In a general WFH scenario, the productive work happens before even the regular office work hours or late towards the midnight. Thus, FAQ BoT can become handy to address the employee request quickly.
3. A dedicated help desk. This can bring the pleasure of communication via chat/call/video-call. This make them feel connected. And get their queries addressed..

In a remote working model,the organisations should have tools, to enable the same. A collaboration platform like REMO shall help the organisation to improve employee engagement to a larger extent.

The of the prominent aspect, of the WFH scenario is Quality of Life (QoL). As the tools can show the engagement of the employees in their online platforms. They can also give interesting details. The QoL relates to 3 major aspects – Work life balance, facility and environment. The first two aspects can be better managed than the latter.

1. Their working pattern
2. Working time
3. Engagement with respect to various tools across devices
4. Average time spent per day as well as average time spend per month (ATD/ATM) by the employee.

The above list can elucidate to the organisation, what would be the impact on the Quality of life of the employee from Work life balance perspective. With cloud becoming the dominant force for rendering all services, enabling the cloud facility available to the employee is a simple affair for the organisation.

When QoL is better managed, the WFH is breezy for employees. In our following series we shall look into Growth and KPI. The next blog shall complete the remote work framework. Do share your thoughts on the remote work model and employee engagement in this scenario.