In this ongoing pandemic, organizations have responsibly avoided face-to-face interaction and switched to a remote or work-from-home (WFH) culture. While 75% of companies believe that remote work will remain a permanent option for some of their employees, this forced, accelerated transformation has been challenging for everyone.
So how does a business maintain process quality and deliver exceptional, uninterrupted customer experience, when its workforce is spread geographically?
Connecting and Collaborating
Digital tools are available to maintain employee outreach, with notifications, campaigns, announcements, and, most importantly, the ability to check in on personnel and ensure that they’re safe and well. The best connection setups will give employees multiple options for communication, helping them stay engaged and keeping morale high.
Enabling and Empowering
Remote work means different things to different people at different managerial levels, so it’s important to set guidelines on communication expectations, working hours, and performance metrics. An effective WFH strategy ensures that employees, despite being dispersed, continue to work toward one goal, built around the company’s core values.
At Inspiro, we began the pandemic with daily calls, to assess the situation and devise a top-to-bottom strategy that would fine-tune WFH policies and processes. A critical step was equipping our people with the necessary tools, along with continuous virtual learning and upskilling, to adapt to new ways of communicating and working.
Investing and Inspiring
To achieve success in a WFH scenario, trust is key – in the simplest terms, when you give personnel all the support you can, you just have to trust that they will, in turn, give all they can, even without immediate supervision. Thankfully, research shows that employees at high-trust firms are better at communicating, more collaborative, more loyal, and suffer less from stress and anxiety, all of which improve performance.
Inspiro works on a blended delivery model, meaning that remote teams like QA, IT, tech support, and more have to collaborate constantly – everyone has to do their part, or the whole thing falls apart. So we knew from the start that the continued growth of both our employees and our enterprise would depend on the trust we were able to invest in them, as well as inspire from them. With complete faith, therefore, we accelerated our investment in automation and IT, giving our best to help our people do their best.
Our efforts and trust were rewarded. Just three months into our WFH policy, our internal survey found that, among our people:
- 74% are highly engaged
- 92% are clear about their roles and responsibilities
- 76% agree that management is strong and effective
- 81% agree that their reporting managers have the tools to measure performance
Inspiro’s remote productivity numbers have gone up by 30%! This translates into highly-engaged people, working tirelessly to deliver winning customer experiences. We continue to support, nurture, and celebrate our employees, believing that a little positivity goes a long way toward getting us all through this turbulent time.