With the current lockdown in the UK, we are seeing a lot of employees working from home.
The influx in this flexible working has proven invaluable in showing businesses and employees alike that remote working and flexible working is a possibility. We recently wrote about the expectation that remote working will become more of the norm, once the country recovers from the pandemic.
Whilst many employees may prefer to continue to work flexibly or remotely in one way or another, with 3 in 5 employees preferring this new way of working to continue into the future, it has also transpired that there are things that the UK public does miss about being in the office.
Vodafone has conducted research about what employees miss most about being in the office and the outcome might surprise many people:
· 30% of the respondents admitted to missing having the opportunity to bounce ideas with their colleagues;
· 40% miss their colleagues in general;
· 21% of the respondents miss collaborating with their colleagues; and
· 17% miss learning from others and generally having adult conversations.
The above shows us the importance of keeping the staff morale during these difficult times. It is not easy to keep in touch when everyone is busy juggling working from home with a busy home life, but it is highly recommended that you try to keep in touch with colleagues and employees as much as possible.
From a business perspective, we would recommend that you consider:
· Regular catch up calls with the team – even once a week could do wonders for morale;
· Designated 'buddy' for your team so that they will keep in touch with a person in the team that would avoid the feeling of being all the more isolated, during isolation; and
· Regular updates to the team on what is going on – even just a brief email every once in a while so that the team feeling is kept somewhat alive.
We appreciate that these are challenging times for our colleagues, clients and everyone else and our expert team remains on hand to support you as best as we can. If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact our team by sending your details to deana@gepp.co.uk and we will be happy to set up a FREE 30 minute consultation with a member of our team (who, incidentally, are all working from home!)
