Enabling Your Employees to Work Effectively from Home

How to enable your employees to work effectively from home in these unprecedented times.

With the COVID-19 pandemic upon us, many businesses are having to consider how their employees may work from home while maintaining their normal workflow.

Working from home offers the opportunity to maintain the way your business works and allows flexibility in how your users get their work done. It can be a big change for your users as they look for ways to balance home and work life, maintain focus and continue to be fully productive.

The team here at Resonate have formulated a list of best practices for working from home; key elements that you may wish to share with your employees:

• Set Up a Routine. Suggest to your users that they divide up their time and work more efficiently by prioritising their tasks.
• Maintain Healthy Boundaries. Communicate the importance of the following actions with your team:
  • Take breaks
  • Stay hydrated
  • Give themselves the opportunity to “Log Off”
• Organise a Dedicated Workspace. Suggest to your users that they find a dedicated workspace to help minimise distractions and focus on keeping their work and personal lives 'separate'
• Communicate Frequently with Colleagues – Advise your team to make use of Instant Messaging and Calling when possible. This will help alleviate the negative effects of 'isolation' as well as making it easier to keep colleagues up to date with progress and their working schedule.

Once your users are comfortable with the concept of working from home, they need a reliable platform that they can use to complete their work and keep in touch. Microsoft Teams is a fantastic platform with both calling and collaboration facilities that will help your users stay connected to their team(s) while providing access to all the tools and resources they need to get their work done during this difficult time.

The team here at Resonate have curated a list of ways to improve your users' experience when working from home while using the Microsoft Teams platform:

• Achieve the Best Possible Connection. Advise users of the importance of:
  • Using a good quality headset to make calls
  • Using a wired connection where possible
  • Keeping high bandwidth activities (such as playing games and streaming video) to a minimum.
• Make the Most of Meetings. Encourage your users to use video if they feel comfortable and to use the background blur feature to avoid any unwelcome distractions
• Collaborate Using the Whiteboard Feature. Advise your users that Microsoft Whiteboard is integrated with every Teams meeting; bringing a touch of creativity to their collaboration and allowing them to communicate sometimes complex ideas more succinctly
• Recording Meetings. Encourage users to record important meetings so any participants that are (for example) double-booked or running late don’t miss out on the discussion completely
• Live Meeting Captions. Advise users that live captions are available for those who are hard of hearing, have different levels of language proficiency or are connecting from a location with loud background noise
• Collaborate Within Teams. Encourage users to make use of both 'Teams' and 'Channels' to collaborate effectively and advise them that they have integrated apps within Teams to extend their experience further
• Customise the Teams Interface. Advise users that they can organise the order of their teams' list, pin certain channels, hide certain teams and manage their notifications from within the application