How to Keep Your Business Afloat While Working From Home

Posted on April 23rd, 2020
Articles Business Skills & Planning

The following content is paid for by The Document Warehouse. 

Woman working from home

The President recently announced an extension of the initial 21-day lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. This has left many companies with no other choice but to continue to allow their employees to work from home.

If this is the first time you’ve had employees working remotely, you may have gone into slight panic mode, wondering how everything will work out. Do your employees have enough resources? How will you ensure they are productive at home? If they don’t have resources, how will your company support them? All these questions could leave business owners wondering what to do.

But now that you’ve managed your employees from your home office, you may realise that this IS working. Or you could be on the other side of the fence, hoping that lockdown would not be extended so that your company can go back to the normal office life you are accustomed to.

Here are four things to remember to do for your business to remain successful while your employees work from home:

Check-in with employees while they are working from home

Checking on the mental well-being of your employees is essential. They are the heart and soul of your company and if they are not okay, it may affect the productivity and quality of their work. Everyone has different circumstances that are currently affecting them. Make sure to check in with them mentally. It can be as easy as a quick five-minute call asking how are they coping and if there is any additional support you can provide.

Allow social interaction even when working remotely

Working remotely is not something you planned. So understand that your employees have gone from seeing each other daily  for about eight hours to not seeing each other at all. Spare the first five-to-ten minutes of your weekly meetings to ask personal questions like what’s the latest series they are watching, what did they get up to this past weekend, etc. Doing so shows them that you care and can easily break the ice.

Make access to files easier

For employees to work efficiently, avoid unnecessary obstacles while they work from home. If you have not already done so, find out how they are doing with accessing files and if there are any challenges they are facing. You may not have had enough time to provide VPN access to everyone in your company, but make use of cloud services like Google Drive to store and upload files. This will make things easier for them and alleviate unwarranted stress while they work from home.

Uphold the integrity of clients

While you’re making sure your employees are happy working from home, don’t neglect your clients. Send them a message or an email to check in with them and reassure them that it is ‘business as usual.’ They must be able to trust you to do their work and to keep their files safe, especially during these uncertain times.

Now would be a good time to invest in a document management system for your business to manage data capturing, document scanning and the retrieval of records. This system tracks documents using unique barcodes, and the document status is updated every time a document is added, moved, retrieved, boxed and sent offsite for efficient retrieval. This allows you and clients to access files remotely from anywhere in the world, including the comfort of your home.

Remember, apart from checking in on tasks, make sure that your employees and clients are happy. Once this is done, you are already winning as a business owner.