Remote working was practiced many years ago in some IT industries where physical presence in the office was not mandatory. But with the global crisis of pandemics, which took a heavy toll on human lives, now it has become imperative for remote working to be adopted by many companies as during this crisis, many companies had suffered heavily in terms of financial losses.
To recover such losses, the best option for the companies is to drastically cut their operational costs at all levels by allowing some of their operations to be performed through remote working. It is also safe for employees to work remotely as it has many advantages for employers and employees. In a way, it’s a win-win situation for all.
For employees, it’s a respite from daily commuting to the workplace was the main obstacle that employees tackle; it gives them a better opportunity to manage work-life balance, and they can have quality time with their families and attend to their organizational tasks without hassle. On the other hand, for companies, there is a reduced rent on office space, lower expenses for providing ergonomic seating arrangements for the employees, and reduced expenses on logistics, electricity, security, etc.
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7 Challenges of Remote Work for Employees
With a rapid increase in work from home, many employees still struggle with the challenges of managing their personal and professional lives. It is paramount that they work on tackling such challenges to ensure their productivity in the tasks.
Some of the challenges of working from home to be tackled on a priority basis are listed below:
1. Maintaining Proper Communication
When it comes to remote working, there is always a chance for a lack of information or miscommunication between the management and the remote workers. For remote workers, it becomes a really big challenge, especially if their team works in the office, but they don’t and miss out on all the discussions happening without them. Communication issues affect work productivity and the self-esteem of remote employees, highlighting the importance of productivity monitoring software.
2. Remote Collaboration
It’s a common challenge for many remote teams to collaborate with one another from different locations. When the team members are in the office, they can clearly interact with each other with their documents, projects, etc., without limitations. Still, when working remotely, it poses a challenge not only in terms of interacting with one another but also in terms of their security.
3. Dealing with Network Issues
When there is work from home, there can be issues with internet connectivity due to either outages or system faults. At times, such stoppers become so frustrating when a remote worker is in the midst of some important project, communicating with any remote team member, or attending any meeting online.
This results in affecting their tasks and missing out on the discussions discussed in the meetings, which, in the end, eventually affects the remote workers’ concentration and effort that was put into the task before.
4. Overwork
Most of the remote workers overwork because they often fail to switch off and make it to the end of the day. It happens various times that when they are busy with some task or any project, they forget to take breaks in between and also forget to realize the reasonable time to call it a day.
It also happens that the moment they log out and have a notification pop up either on their laptop or any other electronic device, if they try to catch up, they end up working overnight and forget to stick to their office routine.
5. Feedback
There’s always thought of a lack of productivity and effort in tasks with the remote workers when they have to work from home. The constant supervision and attention they used to get from their seniors or supervisors while working at the office are lacking while working from home.
This, in turn, affects the remote worker’s dedication and efforts put into the tasks while working from home, which, in the end, definitely affects the remote worker’s competence but also affects the productivity of the company.
6. Dealing with Distractions
Since office and home boundaries are not clearly demarcated for remote workers, they may sometimes have to attend to their domestic chores like grocery shopping or some other miscellaneous work, which ultimately affects their productivity and compromises their team progress.
7. Employee Health
The sudden shift to a remote working setting has been stressful for many employees. When they are alone and have no physical connection, which they used to have in their office, they easily get stressed and start feeling anxious.
They also have difficulty adapting to the sudden increase in workload while working from home, which affects them physically because they sit for long hours and mentally. In a recent survey of around 7,000 professionals conducted by Blind, it was found that 73% of workers are burnout and 27% say that it’s because of no separation between their work and personal life.
7 challenges for employees to face at work from home and how to tackle them
Some of the ways remote employees can tackle such challenges are listed below.
1. Handling the Communication Issues
To tackle this challenge, it is important to facilitate proper two-way communication between the management and the remote workers, which can be greatly accomplished by using a proper online communication tool such as an integrated live chat tool or through encrypted video conferencing instead of communicating through emails or text messages to prevent any type of miscommunication or loss of information.
2. Remote Collaboration Issues
The most important thing for remote collaboration is to have an effective communication medium; email is not one of them. Artificial intelligence tools such as encrypted video conferencing and integrated live chat tools can be used for safe and secure collaboration with remote teams. They allow the remote teams to collaborate with one another easily without any additional signups, chat or video call with their team members safely and securely, and discuss their projects and tasks without any limitations.
3. Dealing with Network Issues
To handle such a crisis, it is always advisable to have adequate mobile data to run the internet on a laptop. Besides this, remote workers can use various artificial intelligence software that consists of certain tools that can identify faults in both on-site and remote workers’ network connectivity beforehand to prevent interruptions by using network monitoring software before logging into work, thus not affecting their tasks.
4. Managing Overwork Issues
This can be partly mitigated by adopting fixed office timings where their login and logout timings should be fixed and also where the workers can take certain breaks to refresh and recharge themselves. Remote workers can use the time-tracking system to track their login, logout, break timings, and task duration. This helps maintain productivity and prevents overwork.
5. Timely Feedback Issues
This can be solved by various artificial intelligence tools through which remote employees’ activities can be monitored at all times during their working hours and track their workflow and productivity practices, which allows giving an overall assessment from their superiors for the improvement in their performance in the future.
For instance, with the help of employee time tracking software and employee activity monitoring software, every activity or any application a worker uses and how much time is devoted to it during their working hours can be tracked. With the help of features like user status, regular screen capture, and remote barge-in, every remote employee’s online or away status can be monitored, and how much of their active time is spent and on which activities or tasks.
With the help of such tools, their supervisors record their idle and productive hours, producing a productivity graph of the worker at the end. This allows for feedback from the managers to the remote workers to address his shortcomings and also for his continuous improvement.
6. Dealing with Distractions
To opt for the best solution for working from home for such distractions, there should be a demarcated space where no one should be allowed to disturb when the remote worker is logged into the company’s dashboard. There should be a dedicated space in their house with the right infrastructure, which enables the remote employees to sit at their system without causing any damage to their performance.
One of the common ways through which such demarcation can be done is by using ergonomic furniture while working from home. Setting up ergonomic furniture to create an office space in the house benefits the remote worker’s health, which is affected by sitting for longer durations. It increases their concentration and efforts towards the task.
7. Employee Health
To ensure physical and mental well-being, remote employees can take part in social events organized by the management to catch up and connect with their team members where they can discuss their emotions because of the pandemic or some specific problems like isolation or poor motivation through virtual conferencing tools, zoom, etc.
Suppose the company conducts an event on mental health, for instance, stress-relieving techniques by yoga or meditation. In that case, remote workers can join them virtually through video conferencing tools to help them navigate their stress and improve their physical health simultaneously.
Conclusion
In today’s times, it can be seen many companies are adopting that work from home. It has some great benefits for the organization and workers but also comes with challenges.
However, these challenges are not insurmountable. There are ways and means to solve them effectively so remote workers can have a better work-life balance and remain productive for their organization.
