Home for the Holidays: Navigating Productivity for Your Remote Team 🧑🎄
A shot of the Sipley the Best team at work in office in downtown Sanford.
I’m Dreaming of a Hybrid Work Model, for Christmas 😉
Let’s chat today about the world of hybrid and remote work options. According to Forbes, 98% of employees want the option to work remotely at least part of the time, and 40.9% of employees in 2023 are either hybrid or remote workers. Learn how to keep productivity and morale high while your employees are working from home.
News from Sipley the Best
A Job Seeker’s Crash Course: Sipley the Best has released its first digital learning course, designed to guide candidates through the wild world of job seeking! This course delivers knowledge, insights, and coaching on everything you need to be a great job seeker, including topics such as
📄 Resumes, Cover Letters, and Letters of Recommendation
🗺️ Navigating Job Boards
🎤 Before, During, and After the Interview (Part 1)
🎬 Before, During, and After the Interview (Part 2)
🤝 Networking: Get off the Screen!
🚀 Leveraging Social Media
🧩 Employee-Employer Fit
🤷 Handling Rejection
💼 The Art of Negotiation
We’re offering a discount on the program - it’s only $14.99 using this link or the code HOLIDAYS. Another bonus? If you have questions after completing the program, just send an email to Dawn@sipleythebest.com for a response within 48 business hours.
Learn more about the course here!
Quote of the Week
“I can work anywhere. I wrote in bedrooms and living rooms when I was growing up with my parents and my brother in a small house in Los Angeles. I worked on my typewriter in the living room, with the radio and my mother and dad and brother all talking at the same time. Later on, when I wanted to write Fahrenheit 451, I went up to UCLA and found a basement typing room where, if you inserted ten cents into the typewriter, you could buy thirty minutes of typing time.”
— Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203
Even famous author Ray Bradbury was great at working from home!
The HR 101 - Keeping Remote Work Holly and Jolly (and Productive)
Working from home comes with its fair share of pros and cons. With 98% of employees seeking remote options, let’s learn how to mitigate the cons of having many team members working in their PJ’s at home.
Mastering virtual communication
Without the employee in the office, it’s harder to facilitate the back-and-forth communication needed to complete tasks or brainstorm and discuss current projects. A couple solutions could include:
🎄Scheduling daily or bi-weekly check ins via a Zoom or Microsoft Teams calls to ensure everyone’s on the same page.
🎄Using a communication platform like Slack, GroupMe, Discord, or a related server. Separate the chat into different channels for different topics (such as accounting department, new product release, HR updates, IT support, etc.) so remote employees can stay connected.
🎄Setting clear expectations around when and how the employee should be working. Maybe you need an update on their work by a specific time, or the employee needs to be fully engaged and ready to hop on a call at any time of the day. Communicate this to employees so they aren’t taking Fido for a walk at a critical point of the workday.
🎄Avoiding micromanaging too, though. If it doesn’t matter how or when the employee gets the work done and their work is largely autonomous, save yourself the hassle of telling them they need to write 456 words between 8:14 - 8:49 am. Instead, focus on the outcomes of their work. If they’re struggling to complete a project as assigned, discuss with them what is causing issues and at this point, you might want to look more closely at how their time is being spent.Create community
Being an employee of your team is not just a paycheck and benefits package, but offers your employees socialization and community. It’s harder (or at least, different) keeping this feeling of togetherness when some aren’t physically in the office. A few ideas you could implement include:
🎄Using your communication server to create casual, non-work related threads (for example, a channel for “water cooler chat” or people to post pictures of their pets).
🎄Creating challenges for employees to share pictures based on a prompt, like “tell us your job without telling us your job,” “the favorite part of my job,” “my favorite restaurant order,” or “Christmas decorations.”
🎄Offering remote events, such as a digital watch party of a holiday movie or a Zoom happy hour where everyone brings their favorite drink.Set up the infrastructure
While community, clear communication, and clear duties assigned are critical for remote work, it isn’t going to actually work if you aren’t sending employees home with the tools they need to succeed.
🎄Be sure to have a robust onboarding program for any employees who are remote from the get-go. With turnover being the highest in the first few weeks of the employee’s time with the company, you need to create the clarity they need to learn their duties and complete their job.
Also, check out some of these programs for use with your team:
🎄Google Drive
🎄Microsoft 365
🎄Slack
🎄Zoom
🎄Asana
🎄Monday.com
🎄Trello
🎄Notion
🎄GitLab
