How to Incorporate a Flexible Work Week without Losing Productivity
There exists a thin line between keeping your employees happy and keeping them productive. One might even refer to it as a dicey balance. The pandemic brought with it several disruptions; most of which were negative. But we have to agree that it pushed us out of normalcy at the work place. It threw us in the very wild, murky waters of remote working and flexible work weeks. And oh boy, didn’t we choke on the water a little before we learnt how to swim? Flexible work weeks are the new norm at most workplaces. The challenge for most employers is how to incorporate fluid shifts while still maintaining employee productivity. Sit back, pen and notebook in hand and take notes from us today on how to navigate this new phase of work.
So how do you incorporate a flexible work week without losing productivity?
Emphasize on the importance of productivity to your employees
Effective communication is an underrated super power. Make it clear to your employees that if they want the flexible work week to be a permanent thing, they need to put in the work. Employees will time and again value their flexibility. Knowing that their flexibility is highly dependent on productivity, they will make sure that productivity is at an all-time high.
Focus on deadlines and results rather than approach
The bitter truth is that you will not be able to micro-manage your employees. So focus on the results delivered rather than how they arrive at those results. Assign your employees work and issue deadlines for submission of results. Now, we know they will all work to beat the deadline, right?
Use Tools for managing remote work/workers
Technology is a savior in so many ways. There exists several tools you can use to effectively manage a remote workforce. Here are some of our favorites:
- Slack This is a communication platform very effective for teams. By bringing people together to work as one unified team, Slack transforms the way organizations communicate. It also provides for creation of different channels on the platform. This can allow you and your team to have different conversations ongoing simultaneously. You can have a channel for marketing, another for HR and another for fundraising. How cool and effective is that?
- Crew HR & Payroll Software Crew is an award-winning People Operations Platform that makes it easy to manage your employee documents, HR, benefits, payroll, time and attendance. Can you imagine monitoring your employees’ progress from the comfort of your home with one single click? Crew HR& Payroll Software can handle all employee management tasks for you. The good thing is that there is no installation fees required! Click here to book a demo today.
- Asana This one is an absolute favorite. It is a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. Asana allows you to assign tasks to individual team members along with the intended deadlines. It is so comprehensive you can add subtasks to the tasks and indicate collaborations on the projects. It also has a place to mark complete once a member finishes an assigned task. Asana also sends notification updates to members everyday concerning their tasks; reminding them when they are due.
- Trello It is a collaboration tool that categorizes your projects into boards. At a glance, Trello tells you projects being worked on, who's working on what, and the stage something is in a process. Picture a team board, jammed with checklists of sticky notes, with each note as a task for you and your team.
- Zoom This is a video conferencing call software. Frankly speaking, most of us didn’t know about Zoom until the pandemic hit. But now we can’t seem to imagine our work life without it. You can use Zoom for your daily stand up meetings with your employees. You can also use it to conduct interviews or hold sessions depending with what your line of work entails. It is a very handy and much needed tool in managing a remote team.
- Google Meet This is a video communication software developed by Google. It is one of two apps that constitute the replacement for Google Hangouts, the other being Google Chat. It works similar to Zoom. You can use it for your meetings. It allows for you to present during meetings by sharing your screen.
- Zapier This application allows for easy automation of processes. You can connect your apps to Zapier and automate workflows. It moves info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work.
This may sound shocking to some, but studies done around the flexible work week have actually shown that productivity does not take a nose dive. You however have to be very tactical and strategic about implementing this model in ways that will sustain productivity. If you grant your employees flexibility in how they work, it can proportionally increase their productivity.