Building a Resilient Remote Work Culture for SMEs
Resiliency must be a focus for so many businesses due to this latest global crisis. Resiliency in health care, social support, financial support for citizens and economic support for businesses have been a real focus of late. In the United Kingdom,some would agree that the government response has not been perfect, but in the typical British way, we are all resilient and working together to fight back both socially and economically. In fact, UK resilience to the pandemic was scored ‘below average’ among the D-10 in regard to public health resilience – behind countries like India, the USA, Canada, and Australia. Just like in business, resiliency or the ability to adapt to new problems when faced with new challenges is important. Even if a company is financially stable if the work culture is not strong then we can expect fall out. The Office for National Statistics predicted that half of the UK workforce would be working remotely in 2020; but since the COVID-19 outbreak, the majority of businesses were seen to embrace this unusual way of working to align with the limitations of lockdown. With this situation present in our society, how would a new small business build a resilient remote work culture? Set rules of technology use A business should have a well defined plan and platform to where work will be conducted digitally to ensure that no one is left behind. You can emphasize asynchronous communication so that everyone can work based on their workload and availability. Schedule everything Employees are harder to reach unlike the traditional work set up where you can simply call an employee to your office. As people work from home their other duties, aside from being your employee, are difficult to neglect (especially for parents with young children). For that, a business should emphasize the importance of scheduling meetings. Scheduling also helps an employee prepare for the technicalities he/she might need to fix beforehand. Provide Safety Everyone is going through something right now so it is necessary to impose a safe environment for working; such that employees know that aside from their physical health, your company also cares for their mental and emotional health.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterprises
