Work From Home has become a common working method during the Covid-19 pandemic. Regarding HR professional, if you’re wondering how to maintain team motivation when people no longer meet face to face, you’ve picked the right place to confide! Having multiple times ramping up remote work plans for an entire company, here are 4 lessons that I have learned to boost up Sutunam’s culture and avoid productivity mistakes.
1. Become an example for your own team!
When the distance from the king-sized bed to the worktable is surprisingly shortened, from a daily trip across the city to now only a few steps, anyone can easily fall into the trap of laziness. In fact, when no traffic jams run after you, instead of getting up early to get ready for work, you decide to stay just a bit longer, but enough to make you almost late for the work shift! Solution? Be that pioneer to your team and stand up against the “lazy enemy”. Be punctual at work, be respectful of logging time manner, be productive consistently and be active in updating all the feedbacks or changes, are always undoubtedly perfect recipe to build a personal brand for every HR professional!
Be indifferent to changes, at the same time. That’s right! Changes are inevitable, then eagerly accept them as a colorful part as always 😉 Before, you always came to the company early and greeted your teammates with a big smile? Now, you can greet your colleagues with a funny song like ‘Good morning’ wish!
Activities, additionally, like a workout at home can renovate our productivity while a good playlist for coding can raise the concentration levels while reducing feelings of stress and loneliness.
2. Determine how your team should communicate!
What is your preferred method of communication? Whether you prefer emails over phone calls, or your company already uses an online workspace software, let your team know exactly where you expect to receive communication from them while they’re working remotely. When possible, keep communication in one central place so cross-collaboration can still happen and so, as an HR professional, you can gauge overall work sentiment and productivity as a whole.
3. Tighten internal communication!
My initial biggest concern from the early days of working remotely was the motivation of SutuTeam. Physical interaction has disappeared completely, replaced by virtual interaction, which requires voluntary through online channels, how can the whole team keep a normal interaction? For instance, the offline Friday afternoon party will be turned into a group video call at every week’s end, SutuEr will prepare their favorite snack and all the members will participate in virtual team-building games. SutuTeam’s favorite online interactive games are Exploding Cats and Kahoot (a type of Quiz game). You turn, my friend, why don’t you started to choose your favorite available video conferencing applications, such as Zoom, Google Meet, etc? These group calls will help maintain the connection between members and bring back moments of refreshment from stressful working hours.
Moreover, why don’t create a challenge or competition to strengthen the motivation of our team? Who has the best #Myworkplaceathome photo? Who would take the Push-up challenge? Easy squeezy tip to bring people closer, and unlock a new aspect of your teammates? They were playing guitar bass for a local brand! Obviously, you didn’t expect that much 😛
Besides, the toasting party to celebrate the successful accomplishment of one project with positive comments and the birthday party where the candles are rotted together will be replaced by candle rot through screens. However, a HR professional can do better, by sending birthday gifts and handwritten wishes to our teammate’s door! We can think of many new ways to motivate and boost up team spirit with all the heart.
4. Apply different methods but not at the same time!
You might think that if all the above tricks were applied at the same time, wouldn’t the effectiveness will reach the best score? However, after observing the Work from home periods, we realized that no method can be one-size-fits-all towards our member. In fact, everyone has their own personality with different motivation and energy in work. So it’s HR Professional’s job to find a suitable plan for each member or each group. Be observant and patient by listening to what our team said during breaks, we found the touching point to not only bring our team satisfaction but also create a unique remote experience.
Final Thoughts
Our ultimate goal is to help our team function productively and efficiently from a distance. Then we hope these above tips can bring out some ideas which helps your team keep positive energy in Covid-19 pandemic period. Above all, we should see Work From Home as a good team-building experience, which requires us to be more creative and focus on communication as clear as possible to achieve the good results. In the future, maybe our world can change completely the tradition way to work, so as HR professional, we have to train our intuition to adapt to lightning-fast change in any condition.
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