As your team adjusts to the work-from-home (WFH) setting, challenges are bound to arise. Many teams are realizing that the core pillars of teamwork — collaboration, accountability, and engagement — have become more difficult to sustain as a remote workforce.
The cumulative effect of these challenges is difficulty maintaining the speed and agility organizations require. According to our recent survey, nearly one-third of employees (31%) struggle to maintain a fast pace of work at home.
At the same time, speed has become even more crucial to business success as organizations strive to adapt to rapidly changing markets and fulfill shifting consumer demands.
If you want your team to succeed in the WFH era, they’ll need to add WFH software to their digital arsenal — WFH software that is designed to foster collaboration, accountability, and engagement will empower teams to thrive despite novel challenges.
Diminished transparency harms teamwork
Poor transparency is at the heart of many challenges that impede teamwork and hinder speed. Unfortunately, nearly one-half of employees (40%) say transparency has declined since transitioning to the WFH setting, according to our survey.
Often, ineffective communication is to blame for low transparency, but another major contributor is the siloed way teams create and use data.
Teams today use dozens of digital platforms, each of which produces massive stores of valuable data. The issue is everyone on the team doesn’t use every platform, which limits their access to important information.
Unless all team members share access to the data housed in disparate systems, have clarity into the team strategy and KPIs, and maintain visibility into one another’s projects, bottlenecks and inefficiencies are inevitable.
More meetings is not the answer
While working from home, team leaders tend to rely more on meetings to bolster communication and remedy transparency deficiencies. More than half of employees (59%) say they have more meetings in the WFH setting.
While the intention is in the right place, the strategy is misguided.
Meetings may seem like the most obvious solution for improving communication, syncing on projects, and boosting transparency, but they are not always the most productive or effective way to share information. While some meetings are essential, many others end up wasting time, breaking employee concentration (the well-known “Zoom fatigue”), and slowing down the overall pace of work.
More than one-third of employees (37%) said one of the biggest challenges they face while working from home is spending more time on calls and in meetings and less time working.Too many meetings can also hurt employee accountability. Teams that rely on meetings to make decisions gradually become unable to take action without them. This is a subtle effect that can have a major impact on speed and agility.
In order to make informed decisions, keep up the flow of work, and adapt to emerging challenges, employees need real-time access to relevant information in the moment of need via WFH software.
Teams that use a Work OS manage WFH challenges with ease
To understand the impact of a Work OS on WFH teams, we segmented the survey results by employees whose teams use a Work OS (users) and employees whose teams do not (non-users).
The results were clear: teams that use a Work OS fare better amid the challenges of working from home. With a WFH software that supports collaboration, engagement, and accountability, teams can keep speed and agility high.
Work OS enables seamless collaboration
According to the survey, 69% of employees who use a Work OS say they haven’t experienced additional challenges while WFH, which means the platform helps enable a consistent level of collaboration, even when team members are physically disconnected.
Most notably, 28% of non-users struggle to share data and information while working from home, compared to just 14% of Work OS users. Another 47% of non-users say communication has gotten worse and less efficient since transitioning to WFH, compared to 30% of Work OS users.
WFH software protects employee engagement
Team leaders can promote higher engagement with WFH software that improves transparency. Visibility into business goals, performance metrics, and related data helps individuals better understand the value of their role and see the impact of their contribution, which increases motivation.
According to our survey, a Work OS helps teams maintain steady engagement levels. Nearly half of users (45%) haven’t experienced a change in their engagement level since transitioning to WFH, compared to only 29% of non-users who could say the same.
With a Work OS, accountability is front and center
The survey demonstrates that WFH software such as a Work OS helps keep accountability high: 34% of non-users reported decreased accountability in their teams for projects and tasks, compared to just 14% of Work OS users.
A Work OS enhances individual and team accountability because it requires a high degree of transparency. When every individual’s goals, tasks, KPIs, and progress are visible to all team members, they’ll face a healthy dose of social pressure to take ownership of their work and perform at the highest level.
Equip your team with the right WFH software
The way teams work is changing. Challenges in the WFH setting are inevitable, but they are not insurmountable. As businesses adapt to daily market ups and downs, shifting customer demands, and the need to build new strategies, employees who are equipped with the right WFH software will be positioned to succeed.
