It seems like only yesterday that remote work was being touted as the future of the workplace. How quickly things change.
COVID-19 has forced millions of employees to head home to work. It’s also left many companies scrambling to craft a distributed workforce management strategy that adequately supports employees in this new normal. While some organizations have been able to draw on their existing disaster preparedness plans, few envisioned a scenario where an entire workforce could be transitioned to an at-home environment.
As the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, it’s imperative to quickly find new ways to keep employees and businesses productive. One solution that makes the transition much smoother for everyone is a digital knowledge management platform that lets employees work remotely while still delivering an excellent customer experience.
Productivity takes a hit when employees are new to working remotely, so it’s incumbent on business leaders to implement methods and processes that maintain productivity while keeping employees engaged. Knowledge management combined with clear expectations, a culture of accountability, and improved communications and collaboration can help keep remote teams on task and effective.
Transform Massive Challenges Into Meaningful Change
Turning plans into reality isn’t easy in the best of times. When forced to accelerate the process due to an unprecedented event like a pandemic, it can be mind-boggling. And since most people — and businesses — don’t adapt well to change in the first place, embracing the idea that there’s now an urgent need to do things differently has proved unsettling.
Like it or not, the global, social and marketplace shifts triggered by the coronavirus are rapidly altering the nature of work and how organizations are doing business. Turning challenges into opportunities for improvement is an idea with historical value that business leaders should adopt if they want to survive and even flourish during these rocky times.
What Do You Want From Me?
Autonomy is an essential element in building engagement and productivity, but that doesn’t mean employees aren’t looking for guidance on what’s expected of them. Present circumstances have upended the status quo, making it even more crucial to provide clear instructions on the role an employee plays, what goals they’re expected to meet and how they can remain a critical part of the team. Collaboration tools help create a culture of accountability and encourage employees to stay motivated.
It’s up to leadership to light the way and manage the friction that comes with these shifting conditions. Encouraging everyone across the organization to be positive change agents in their roles can result in a more engaged workforce and efficient workplace, even if that workplace is scattered. Instead of changing mission statements, organizations should value and reward outcomes that are achieved by employee adaptive behaviors.
Building A Remote ‘Home’ Team
There’s no denying proximity encourages work coordination and collaboration. With teammates spread across locations and even time zones, technology will now need to play an even greater role in keeping everyone on the same page.
Collaborative technologies embedded into organizational processes help transform workflows and turn knowledge into action. But they need to do more than just help employees talk about their work. They should also improve the speed and effectiveness of work efforts and make it easier for team members to share knowledge that helps shape how work is performed. The payoff is better results, greater worker innovation and higher productivity.
Increased Communication = Increased Productivity
Research shows that remote workers are already more productive. But there are legitimate concerns that remote work can also decrease the communication and collaboration that typically happen in an office.
Digital workplace tools foster frequent communication and increase employee engagement, which currently hovers between 30% and 40%. They also reduce misunderstandings and mistakes and increase accountability. Productivity can increase by up to 25% in organizations where employees are connected, which is just frosting on the cake.
Smarter Knowledge Sharing Platforms
Sudden adjustments to one’s personal and work life due to a pandemic can leave a person feeling disoriented, numb and unable to focus. For people who work in customer service, including healthcare call centers, the increased stress level can be overwhelming.
During a crisis, organizations can use knowledge management to help their distributed workforces deal with things like an increased volume of customer calls while reducing agent/customer interaction time and improving agent efficiency. Remote workers easily gain full access to accurate, updated information that allows them to remain productive while delivering a seamless customer experience. And for call centers that have had to increase their number of agents to meet increased demands, knowledge management speeds the agent training and onboarding time.
When Knowledge Is Essential To Success
Crises, by their very nature, hit the pause button on in-progress initiatives so businesses can determine what steps to take to align with their current reality. For some, that means getting their entire organization up to speed. Others might need to focus on one particular area of the business, such as the call center.
There are huge financial considerations, too. If poor and inefficient knowledge sharing costs large businesses $47 million per year in the best of times, the impact the pandemic might have on the bottom line can only be imagined. Knowledge management is loaded with tools designed to make information readily available so that tasks are done more efficiently no matter where workers are located.
Conclusion
As COVID-19 continues its global march, organizations must work efficiently to turn panic and anxiety into productive and proactive distributed workforce strategies. Reducing plummeting employee productivity while soothing highly stressed callers is no easy task. Trying times such as these call for strong leaders to rise to the challenge and assure their employees and customers that all is well.
