5 Tips for Leaders To Help Your Company Stay Aligned in a WFH World

Working from home is the new normal for many companies, and it will continue to be after the Covid-19 pandemic passes. The shift brings with it many changes, and how leaders adapt to guide their employees through the virtual environment will be critical to companies’ results.

With many companies planning to make remote work permanent or implementing a hybrid of remote and office, the key issue for leaders is, How do you practice alignment when your team is no longer working side-by-side in the same building? How do you maintain productivity and morale? 

To help franchise leaders resolve this issue, I offer 5 tips on how business owners and managers can lead their companies effectively in a largely remote-based work environment. 

1) Be empathetic. With many remote workers caring for small children or elderly parents (or both), collaborating with those workers requires a more tailored approach by leaders than when employees were all in one office. Everything is a little more personal in a remote environment. Everyone’s environment and circumstances are different, and remote work has a way of magnifying those differences. Collaborate with remote workers to customize work schedules and structures. Recalibrate new expectations: How do those align with the employees’ responsibilities at home?

2) Reinforce the core values. With the workforce spread apart for long stretches, a company’s culture can be challenged. Thus it’s important for leaders to be proactive and spend time re-emphasizing core values and discussing how those have been the foundation of company success. Leading by example is of critical importance now. The core values start with the leader.

3) Streamline communication. Without having daily in-person interaction, leaders should put extra emphasis on being clear and concise in their virtual communications. Establishing a cadence is key, such as scheduling weekly one-on-one and group meetings to keep everyone informed and feeling valued. Too much communication can come across as untrustworthy; too little and you risk a slide in productivity and employee engagement.

4) Establish boundaries between work-at-home life and home life. Considering the possible distractions at home, it takes a disciplined person to work from home effectively. Thus, leaders must establish some guidelines and encourage good work habits without coming off as overbearing. Possible advice for WFH employees: 1) As much as possible, follow at home the same routines and schedules that you’ve established in the workplace while avoiding household distractions. 2) Staying organized is imperative to staying focused. 3) Try to keep your work area at home as close as possible to the way you might keep it at the workplace. 4) Create lists and break them down into different priorities.

5) Revise and align responsibilities with adjusted roles. The pandemic changed some roles temporarily and others permanently. Examples include a traveling sales rep who can no longer travel, or a customer service rep working from home rather than dealing in person with customers in the store or office. Leaders have to clearly lay out and communicate the revisions, processes, and key performance indicators when responsibilities have been altered. A lot of thought must be put into how WFH or hybrid employees can be as successful in those adjusted roles as they were initially at the workplace.

Parting thoughts

The work-from-home experience will either draw teams closer together or push them further apart. Which outcome you get will largely be decided by how well you translate the core culture from the brick-and-mortar workplace to a virtual workplace.

Doug Meyer-Cuno is an entrepreneur, mentor, and ForbesBooks author of The Recipe For Empowered Leadership: 25 Ingredients for Creating Value & Empowering Others. He founded a food ingredients distribution company, Carolina Ingredients, and expanded it into a nationally recognized and award-winning industrial seasoning manufacturer before it was acquired by Mitsubishi in 2019. Since then he has founded Empowered Leadership, which helps entrepreneurs, business owners, and CEOs scale their companies by empowering their teams.