Effective Remote Working: The New Normal

Working from home is awesome for many modern professionals every once in a while which feels to be a luxury to every employee. Though working from home has become a new normal nowadays due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic worldwide.

While working remotely, an effective leadership plays a very important role in the overall production of an organization. The main responsibility lies in easing the communication between employees, enable people and be caring towards each other. A two-way behavior of leading and collaborating works well in such work from home scenarios.

According to Naval Ravikant, an angel investor, advisor, and founder of AngelList, remote work is the future we all must get ready for.

Let us see some new and exciting ways for the employees and the leaders to make this new normal much more effective:

• Communication is the key to success

Effective and well-established communication channels are vital for making remote working a success. Remote work becomes more efficient and satisfying once the organization sets up an ideal timing and frequency of having conversations over a defined mode of communication.

The managers, as well as the human resource department, should always try to schedule short interval calls from time-to-time even if not necessary. This keeps the employees more engaged in their work.

• Well-being & timely encouragement to employees

It is very important for the managers to acknowledge the stress and empathize with the struggles faced by any employee during remote working at any point in time. Often asking a question about “How is the work going at your side so far?” makes a lot of difference and encourages the employees to work diligently and much more efficiently.

• Leadership & Management

In this time of change and uncertainty, a bona fide leader will always turn out to be a successful one with his whole team intact. By setting up a mission, values, and purpose for every task will always make the employees adhere to the respective timeline of their tasks with a quick turnaround time even when working remotely.

• Proper tools & resources

There are amazing tools to depend upon and make your communication and collaboration even more effective such as:

1. SLACK for real-time messaging and information to flow smoothly across a team
2. ZOOM for setting up a video conferencing call among all the team members which makes everyone feel more connected and aligned.
3. GOOGLE DRIVE/DROPBOX used for sharing important files or documents across the team as well as with the clients all over.
4. TRELLO for collaborating and getting regular and real-time status updates 24/7 or any other item at your convenience.

Working remotely on the whole has been quite a challenging aspect for organizations so far.

Always keep these five guiding principles in mind as the cornerstones for effective leadership while working remotely:

1. Trust people to do the right thing
2. Stay flexible
3. Communicate often, regularly and clearly
4. Enable and support your people
5. Be caring