Strategic HR Technology Investment: A Comprehensive Checklist for Global HR Teams
Engagedly’s expert panel has been working on understanding and addressing the issues faced by the workforce as well as the management during this unprecedented era of remote working.
With the Covid-19 on loose, there’s a situation of global lockdown to prevent the spread of Corona virus. There is a global financial crisis and the stock market has brutally crashed. This is the quickest global health pandemic in the history of humanity and never before have remote populations been so connected.
So, if you find yourself running a remote business in these circumstances, you’re not alone. About 83% of businesses are working towards making remote working easier and seamless. Despite all the procedures and policies in place for remote working, there are a few challenges that every manager/ employee faces during remote work.
a. Social Isolation – One of the very common challenges is that employees feel isolated. This is the time when employees feel less associated to their organizations.
b. Lack of Face to Face Supervision – Similarly, managers feel that due to lack of direct supervision, their employees aren’t working enough.
c. Information Accessibility – This is another challenge that most teams face. While working in a traditional office allows you to access information easily, remote working doesn’t unless all the employees are connected on a platform that allows them to share resources and information.
d. Distractions – Again, when you work from home, there are always a few unavoidable distractions. In case of sudden transition from office to home, some employees face this challenge more than the others.
e. Reduced Productivity – While a few employees can manage to do the best while working from home, most employees can’t stay productive from home.
Also Read: A Guide For The Management – Handle Remote Employees Seamlessly
Here are a few things that you can do to ensure that your employees are comfortable with remote working and stay productive throughout the global lockdown.
Weekly check-ins are a great way to for managers to gain a clear understanding about their employees. They help you improve your organization’s overall productivity by enabling managers and team members to frequently discuss any questions, concerns, or ideas they have.
Having weekly check-ins at your workplace allows you to fix potential issues before they escalate. It is easy to correct any employee performance issues quickly and enhance employee performance which contribute to increase in productivity.
It is important for managers and employees to be on the same page. Frequent employee meetings allow you to do that. There are many tools that you can use for this. Ensuring that you’re aligned will keep the overall meeting on track and make clear dilineations between what should be raised and what should be held for another forum.
When it’s not clear when or how often the meetings will be held, it can create pressure to jam too many topics and discussion points into one session. Establishing a cadence for the meetings will prevent this. Employees won’t feel rushed to give, for example, updates earlier than needed if they know that there’ll be a more timely chance to do so. Engagedly’s software makes this easy with automatic reminders through scheduled email alerts.
Employees tend to feel valued and included when their work is validated and approved by their managers. Giving frequent feedback to your employees allows you, as a manager, to motivate your employees and make them feel validated and heard which in turn results to improved performance and improved productivity.
Having frequent discussions with different levels of employees, helps you improve your leadership skills and helps the employees improve their problem solving skills. This practice is a great way to understand the nature of work and predict any roadblocks and fix them beforehand.
Also read: Continuous Feedback: When Too Much Of Good Can Be Bad
Who doesn’t love a pat on their back from their manager? Recognition is one of the very basic things that every employee craves. Though managers want to recognize the efforts of their employees, sometimes they just don’t do it because they don’t understand how to do it. Most organizations reward their employees with a bonus in their salary during their annual performance reviews, hoping to motivate them for the coming year. Does this approach actually work? It could motivate them for about a month or a quarter for maximum, but not beyond that. And particularly not when they are working from home for weeks.
If you really want to make an impact on your employees with rewards and recognition, it is important to rethink employee rewards and recognition. It is recommended to build an employee rewards and recognition program at your workplace or implement an employee rewards and recognition software.
Setting up an Engagedly account is a piece of cake. All you need is a system and an internet connection. Since Engagedly is a cloud-based service provider, there is no special installation that needs to be carried out and neither do you have to wait for someone to come and install the application for you. An Engagedly account is functional as soon as it’s created and users can begin exploring the application right away.
Carrying out performance reviews through Engagedly is the easiest thing ever. All a manager needs to do is set up a review cycle and Engagedly takes care of the rest. There’s no need for HR managers to chase after employees or managers to complete reviews or stress about review templates or worry about adding feedback or past reviews to the review process. Various module within Engagedly integrate with each other seamlessly in order to ensure a holistic review process.
Feedback and goals are two important components of a review process. The Feedback and Goals features are a great way for managers and employees to not only share and track feedback over a period of time but also keep track of an employee’s work and development over a period of time. These features are not restricted to employees or managers alone. Rather, by making these features available to both of them, Engagedly makes it easier for everyone to communicate, be it about performance, self-development, improvements, achievements etc.
Also read: Engagedly For Managing Your Remote Team – OKRs And Goal Setting
Engagedly takes data security very seriously. Our security policy is in compliance with not only the GDPR regulation recently passed by the EU but also United States security laws. In addition to having a data management policy in place in case of a data breach, we also frequently perform security checks to ensure that our data protection methods are up to date.
Software is only as good as the quality of customer support it offers. Engagedly’s customer support team is responsive and prompt when it comes to dealing with client issues. In addition to our quick turnaround times, we also offer visual guides, demos and documentation to navigate the Engagedly application. By assigning dedicated account managers to each of our clients, we make sure our clients enjoy a hassle-free user experience. Engagedly now offers dedicated customer support in Australia as well.
Engagedly can be customized for organizations of all sizes, be they small businesses or enterprise class organizations. Engagedly’s features can be customized to suit an organization’s needs. Engagedly features are available to users in various, affordable bundles. Users can choose plans and price points that are best suited to them.
Gamification is a major part of the Engagedly application. Through the Gamification feature, users can accumulate points for carrying out social activities and redeem these points through gift cards or rewards that have been set up by the HR manager.
Engagedly’s Learning feature can act as a fantastic tool for employee development. Users can create courses and then assign those courses to others in the organization. We offer a lot of freedom during course creation and users can create courses with different types of units. Created courses can be added to a Library that is available to everyone in an organization.
Engagedly can integrate with HRIS vendors like Namely, ADP and HR Cloud to handle employee date. Additionally, Engagedly can integrate with major applications such as Google, Microsoft, OneLogin, Okta etc to facilitate the Single Sign On process.
In addition to the desktop application, Engagedly is available as a mobile app as well (iOS and Android versions are available in the iStore and Play Store respectively). Through the mobile app, users can continue to communicate In-app plugins for Google and Outlook are available as well.
Want to know how Engagedly can help you with running a remote office seamlessly? Request for a live demo!
