The workplace climate has evolved drastically over the past few months. Since most of the businesses have been working remotely, it has come with the change in employment laws and policies as well.

5 Ways Employee Handbook Helps You Manage Your Remote Team

This is a huge curve and comes with a struggle of maintaining the integrity of the remote workplace, hence it’s important to implement some positive work environment ideas to keep the morale of your employees high.

Moreover, employee handbooks ensure that the new policies can be maintained and enforced effectively, and the remote team performs efficiently.

Here’s how an employee handbook helps you manage your remote team:

Update Remote Policies

Policies are important in managing teams especially now that they are working remotely. It is important to have a sense of continuity across the team regardless of ranks.

Working remotely is definitely a challenge for employees and for the managers as well. Employee handbooks help navigate policies that are updated and made flexible to comply with remote work and communicate with the employees.

With new policies for working hours, absentees, compensations etc, employee handbooks make it easy to communicate them across teams to maintain the work ethic in remote workplace.

Providing Clear Expectations:

Having goals and milestones are important in the workplace but with the change in workplace settings and environment, and without the physical presence of team members, it is essential to make sure that the goals and expectations are clearly communicated across the team.

Employee handbooks can be updated to share new goals and objectives and make sure that the employees are well aware of the newly communicated expectations through the acknowledgment page.

This is really helpful in ensuring everyone’s participation in achieving the goals and making people accountable.

Feedback Mechanism

Companies have recognition programs to provide feedback for employees and help them better themselves for the future.

But with remote work, it is important to provide such feedback on a smaller and regular basis because this is a new setting for everyone and it’s better to share feedback regularly to have a good system in place.

Employee handbooks are an effective feedback tool in this regard. They can be helpful in providing collective feedback on a weekly or monthly basis.

It helps the employees know what the company appreciates about their work and what they can focus on in the future. Having company-wide recognition will motivate the employees for betterment as well.

Provide Resources

Remote work requires using software and other tools that the employees might not be familiar with. Remote teams need new technology and communication tools for example, for web conferencing or software for managing tasks.

Things can get a little complicated if the employees are not properly trained for this work. So it is crucial for the employers to provide the teams with critical tools and resources to learn more about them.

Employee handbooks can be used to provide a list of resources for remote work and set the team up for success. This also shows that the company is concerned for the well-being of its employees and wants to invest in providing better resources for them.

Foster Accountability

As important as it is for teams to be provided with feedback for better performance, it is also important for them to be held accountable for their performance.

Employee handbooks are one of the most effective ways for fostering accountability by putting forth company expectations and accountability procedures.

In many cases, one team’s performance directly affects the performance of other teams which affects the company.

To make sure that the performance of teams has a positive influence on the company, employee handbooks can be used to communicate policies regarding transparency and what the employer expects from the teams.

The bottom line is that employee handbook are a really important means of communication between the team and the company.

They can help make the remote workplace sustainable and manageable, whether it’s in the form of policies and feedback mechanisms, or resources, employee handbooks ensure that there is consistent communication and integrity is maintained throughout the remote work environment.

Some other articles you might find of interest:

Would you like to better understand how to drive and increase traffic to your startup website?

How to Drive & Increase Traffic to Your Startup Website

Do you have what it takes to start and run an online business?

5 Key Skills You Must Have to Start & Run an Online Home Based Business