Working from home is the new normal for many organizations during the COVID-19 crisis. For some, the remote work initiative hasn’t thrown too big of a wrench into their working habits. Other companies, however, are having difficulty adapting.
We understand your stresses over here at Ideawake. It’s not easy to transition over to a fully, or even partially, digital workforce if the necessity hasn’t existed ever before.
We wanted to share with you some of the ways our partners are leveraging our idea management platform to make the transition to remote work while keeping employees up-to-date and engaged.
Identifying and sharing changing processes
Communication is one of the biggest obstacles to overcome when transitioning from in-person work to digital. Even more daunting of a task is effectively communicating how all workplace processes are going to be affected to all employees.
One of the features of our platform is the ability to easily proliferate information across the whole organization or to specific segments. This helps ease employees’ fears of lack of transparency at a time where it’s most needed.
Communicating across geographies
As leadership begins disseminating new information through the platform and through the organization, employees can interact with the updates in real time.
Email chains and spreadsheets leave a lot to be desired. Moderators spend 2.5 hours on them every day, but neither they nor employees can interact with them in real time. They have to wait for participants to respond, but by the time everyone sees it, that update might be out-of-date.
Real time updates not only helps employees stay in the loop, but they also keep employees engaging with the updates, sharing their personal thoughts or hearing out what their peers have to say. The gamification features of the platform, as through the point-collecting and public leaderboard, also help keep this process fun and engaging.
With remote work allowing employees to work despite different departments or geographies, it’s more important than ever to keep communicating and sharing ideas with each other.
Boosting employee engagement and collaboration
When organizations lack face-to-face interaction, there’s room for a lot to get lots in translation between employees. That loss in translation can carry over to customer interactions, which are also likely to be done digitally, as in health care.
Without an effective digital work platform keeping employees engaged, they’re going to have trouble engaging with customers—hearing out their problems and acting on them effectively.
Identifying and responding to obstacles in employees’ work
As your company makes the transition to digital work, employees are inevitably going to have questions on what to do and how to do it.
Moderators will struggle keeping up with all employee questions and obstacles through less agile means of idea management. That means a lot of valuable information vital for productivity and day-to-day tasks will be lost.
This is a recognized issue. In a recent article from Harvard Business Review, one of the biggest pains of remote employees is lack of access to information.
Newly remote workers are often surprised by the added time and effort needed to locate information from coworkers. Even getting answers to what seem like simple questions can feel like a large obstacle to a worker based at home.
“A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers,” Barbara Z. Larson, Erin E. Makarius, and Susan R. Vroman, Harvard Business Review
With Ideawake, moderators can post challenges asking what issues employees are facing with the transition to virtual work, and employees can instantly share their discomforts.
Avoiding siloed ideas and solutions
The number-one issue we see across all of our clients is not receiving organization-wide input in organization-wide issues.
At Ideawake, we believe that the most innovative ideas come from the most unlikely of places. No longer are solutions limited to single departments—or even individuals. From HR to IT, everyone has equal say.