With the rise of technology, many business owners are now able to offer more flexible working options and can allow more of their staff to work from home.

At the end of the day, more and more of us are completing our entire jobs on computers and laptops - some of us are even working from tablets and smartphones - and the need to be in the office merely falls down to the convenience of face to face communication, meetings and presentations. Now, there are other perks to being in the office. You can boost team morale, build better bonds between workers and you can monitor that everyone’s working as they should be.

But when situations like those we’re being faced with at the moment arise, you may find yourself in a situation where it’s best for your workers to stay home if they don’t need to be outside of the house. Here are a few things you can do to ensure that everyone is keeping up to speed and feeling fully supported during this time.

Make Sure Employees Can Communicate with Each Other

Staff need to feel they can communicate with you and anyone else they need easily. Sure, you probably already have email set up on everyone’s systems. But when people are working from home, quick queries could be better dealt with through instant chat rather than getting lost in email threads.

Install software like Microsoft Teams, in which employees can communicate amongst themselves quickly and easily. Software like this also has the option of calling and video calling, which can be great for meetings that need to be carried out.

Make Sure They Have IT Support

Of course, when people are working from home, they’re relying on their tech working. So it’s absolutely essential that you get IT support and ensure that your employees have it no matter where they are. You don’t want machines going down or software problems cropping up that can’t be fixed quickly. This will reduce productivity levels and can result in losses.

Instead, make sure that you use remote and outsourced IT support from a reliable company like techsquared.com and ensure all of your employees know how to get in touch with them should any problems arise. Then, issues can be resolved quickly and people can get back to what they were working on with minimal interruption.

Monitor Productivity

You don’t want to be on your employees’ backs and interrogating them constantly. But you do want to make sure everyone’s still being as productive as they would be in the office.

Make sure that everyone knows what is expected of them and then monitor deadlines to ensure people are sticking to them. Chase up if anything necessary isn’t submitted on time. This will help to make sure projects don’t fall behind and everything keeps ticking over nicely.

These, of course, are just a few different steps that you might want to take to make sure that your employees feel fully supported while working at home. There really doesn’t need to be that much of a change to how your workplace operates - even if people aren’t in the office!