The COVID-19 pandemic pushed all employers to reevaluate working hours and the ability to let some employees move to a hybrid model—or even go fully remote for their role. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk, but if you want to retain your top talent and keep the majority of your employees happy, you might have to be willing to compromise. The team at Saudi Technologies has been extensively studying the flexible work arrangement model and we’ve come up with some strategies you can follow to give your employees the flexibility they desire without losing productivity.
Communicate Expectations Clearly
Make it clear with everyone in your organization that while a flexible work arrangement will be tolerated, it cannot be seen to harm productivity. In this sense, employees know your flexibility is a privilege they have earned and if they don’t want to lose it, they better be willing to put in the work and keep up with demand.
Deadline Focus
In a flexible work arrangement, the days of micro-managing the working processes of your employees are over, and perhaps this is a good thing! Assign a deadline to your employees and make it clear that while working hours are flexible, deadlines certainly aren’t!
Embrace Technology
Harnessing the powers of new technology for communications and project management could revolutionize the way you do business and still allow you to monitor your employees’ progress and performance. Here are a few of our favourite tools that the Saudi Technologies team can help you implement into your daily workflow:
Slack: With free and paid options, this program helps you organize different groups to better communicate in “channels”. In this way, you can stream communications dedicated to marketing or HR or product development, and easily be able to hop between the various channels so you can maintain the big picture.
Trello: Again, with free and paid options for your organization, this cloud-based tool is perfect for project management. It turns every task into a board that can be assigned to various users. Employees or employers can create checklists so you always know where progress is on a certain task.
Zoom: Who doesn’t know Zoom these days? This essential video conferencing tool is great for small meet-ups of a few individuals or for holding a bigger audience of hundreds of people. Zoom has also increased security features to keep your meetings confidential and password protected so you don’t have to worry about sensitive corporate secrets leaking out online! There are also handy recording and transcription services so you can upload meeting results online internally for those who couldn’t make it.
Build A Better Workplace
Allowing flexible work schedules can seem like a daunting task for any manager, but research has shown that in many cases there is no productivity lost with this arrangement. However, you have to have a solid plan in place to pull off the switch successfully. The HR experts at Saudi Technologies are here to help you design a workflow and schedule that will help keep your company on track despite big changes behind the scenes. Contact us today for a free consultation.
