5 Tips Keep your team motivated while working from home I CMMU Mahidol

By  Sawitree Santipiriyapon, PhD Human Resources and Capabilities Development Consultant and Lecturer

With the whole world "on hold", over the past several days we have seen many companies announce that they are recommending their workforce work from home as the worldwide spread of COVID-19 accelerates.
While we can set up our space and get in the right mindset for personal productivity, I haven’t seen a lot of resources focused on how teams stay motivated while working remotely. To successfully manage this change, keep teams engaged remotely, and minimize loss in productivity, we need to tackle knowledge, motivation, and tools.
Moreover, strong relationships and a positive culture can be more difficult to foster at a distance, but both are still vital aspects of employing and retaining a talented and engaged team.

Today I have developed a few tips that might be useful to keep your team motivated and maintain your productivity while working from home with your team

1. Treat working from home like a real job
The number one problem remote workers face is confusing their presence at home with slacking or resting. It requires you to be over communicative. Having a clear set of expectations and a solid communication strategy between you and your boss/ co-workers is the key to mastering remote work.
2. Divide work into small, trackable goals
All goals and tasks should be recorded in a place accessible by the whole team. Collaborative tools keep everyone in sync, up to date on progress, and allow them the flexibility to adjust lists as things change.
Setting small goals are helpful in two ways. First, they clearly show what the team is working on, eliminating ambiguity between distributed team members. Second, they help the team recognize their accomplishments if they have multiple things to check off daily.
3. Start working in weekly sprints
The weekly rhythm pushes productivity while keeping things flexible as priorities shift. Hold short daily standups over video chat. It will vary by the size of the team, but 5–15 minutes should be enough for everyone to give quick updates.
Weekly goals provide structure and daily check-ins ensure the accountability and collaboration needed to generate motivation.
If you need your workforce responsive and engaged during certain hours, communicate that expectation clearly. Encourage employees to allocate and calendar time when they’ll be online and available.
4. Schedule regular meetings
Schedule a few regular meetings to help facilitate the sprint. On Mondays, hold a sprint planning and kickoff meeting for the working team to pull their list of tasks and goals they hope to accomplish for the week.
You can also use this time for team updates and time to check in on how everyone is feeling about the work. Hold 1–2 reviews throughout the week for everyone to provide feedback and check on progress.
When working remotely, there’s no time for spontaneous collaboration. Setting regular meetings keeps expectations aligned and makes space to flag setbacks in a conversational setting. Week to week, the team can recognize their individual and collective progress in established forums.
5. Use your webcam
Just like closing your laptop during an in-person meeting, turning on your webcam signals to the team that you’re present and engaged. With a distributed team, they spend most of their day staring at a metal box.
Making an effort to show up and engage is vital since so much of human communication relies on non-verbal cues. Seeing your co-workers simulates person-to-person connections that you need to build trust.
6. Keep a positive vibe
While this might sound like a fun opportunity for most people, working from home can be pretty isolating. It found that loneliness was most challenge. Loneliness can make people feel less motivated and less productive. By keeping your spirits up, listening to music, performing deskexercises, and interacting with colleagues. This is the best opportunity for you and team to cheer each other up. We all know that this is not easy, but together we can adapt to this new normal and turn this difficulty into a memorable work from home opportunity.
Conclusion
These tips have worked for me in the past. Indeed, you don’t need any fancy software or equipment, just some motivation to organize and structure your workflows and the right mindset. Indeed, many of these practices have also been helpful for me when collaborating in person too. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoy working from home with your colleagues.