How to Keep up Your Employee and Business Wellbeing during Covid-19 | Part 2

5. Organize counselling sessions to cope with remote work

Many employees love flexible work, but not all are prepared to work fully from home – especially if their family is also there. Spouse having virtual meetings, children asking for help and so on – all of these aspects can create a lot of distraction that can create frustration and lower engagement. Even though it’s challenging, there are some tools that might help employees to cope with the need of working remotely.

For example, it might be worth to consider parental counselling for employees who have children at home – sessions where they can share their problems and ask for advice will give information and tools needed to create calmer work settings at home. Additionally, psychological consultations can have positive impact for those employees who struggle without social interaction with other people, depressions or other mental health issues. Nutrition masterclass is also a viable option for many employees and can provide beneficial information on how to prepare healthy food fast for themselves and their families, meaning that they will have to spend less time for cooking and can focus more on their job responsibilities.

7. Involve employees in long-term responsibilities

Involving your employees in long-term projects or responsibilities is important to create sense of stability and show that their work is important for your organisation. Current global market situation might raise employee concerns about potential layoffs even if there are no viable risks. Small, repetitive, short-term job tasks can create feeling that employees are at risk of being let go, therefore long-term responsibilities are vital for ensuring employees value in the future. Additionally, some cross-department long-term activities can also have a positive impact on strengthening employee collaboration on wider level within organisation, as well as promote knowledge sharing among different functions.

8. Host regular live Q&A sessions

Transparent communication with your employees is the key for positive engagement and employee retention as well. One of the worst things that disrupts motivation and engagement is information vacuum about the current situation in the organisation. When employees do not know what is happening with the business, what is the strategy to cope with crisis (if there is one) and what is the overall organizational temperature, it creates stress, anxiety and have negative impact on the trust. There might be a lot of important questions from the side of your employees, but not all are ready to ask them publicly. We highly suggest creating regular live Q&A sessions where management answers on previously sent in anonymous employee questions. Such activity will show that management is open to talk about the situation in the organisation and let employees to be heard. Even if first few sessions have less questions than expected, with time employees will feel more confident to ask for information they feel is important. This can have positive impact also on day-to-day communication as well.