With the end of the year approaching, make sure you’re preparing virtual employees for holiday vacations. In a world where there’s a lot of coronavirus related stress, it’s important for your team to have time to relax and refresh.
It’s also important that your business finishes the year as strong as possible. Remote work (updated statistics) creates some new challenges for the productivity you need. While these are not insurmountable problems, you must think about them and prepare ahead of time.
Consider these tips to make sure the holiday season allows your employees to celebrate and your business to prosper:
Virtual Holiday Vacations: Who is Around?
In a traditional office, it’s easy to wave goodbye to someone who’s leaving on a vacation or visually see when they are gone. If your business has people now working remotely, it may be hard to know who’s working and who’s not there during the holiday season.
Whether it’s a calendar or some other system, make it easy for employees to know who is going to be out of the office. It shouldn’t be a secret. This way people have the time to make adjustments to plans, ask questions, or schedule meetings more effectively.
If you only learn of vacationing coworkers from out of office messages, then you don’t have a good notification system. It’s not surprising productivity falls during the holiday season.
Identify Backups
When someone is out of the office, are there certain duties that need to be performed by someone else? In your business, it may be obvious that a growing pile of work on a desk needs to be addressed.
In the world of virtual employees, you can’t see that desk. So how do you know the work will get done in a timely fashion?
Make sure you identify backups before holiday vacations and get the word out about the change. This should be in addition to updates through phone and email out of office messages.
Ideally, you want the work to get done and not have to bother someone on their vacation with questions.
Schedule Virtual Training
In the traditional office, colleagues can sit with each other and discuss duties that need to be performed during holiday vacations. Perhaps, instructions are kept in a folder that’s found in a desk.
If people are working from home, they can’t sit next to one another and those great instructions may not be accessible.
In today’s world, the employees may need to have a phone call or a video chat to go over things. Instructions may need to be put on a computer network, in an easy to find place.
Software, passwords, or procedures may change over time, so it’s really important for these conversations to happen, as you’re preparing virtual employees for holiday vacations.
A little bit of preparation can make the holidays much more enjoyable for your employees and your business.
Ken Okel Performs Virtual Keynotes Too
