How well is your team doing working from home?

A few weeks ago, without much warning or time to prepare we suddenly found ourselves having to work from home due to social isolation restrictions put in place to limit the spread of Covid-19. It immediately raised a number of challenges for organisations and their teams and there were obvious information gaps.

The Remote Workforce Monitor is a short employee pulse to assist organisations in understanding how their people are doing in terms of productivity, wellbeing, IT systems andto help understand what support they need. 

Let’s look at the reasons why you would want to run this for your team, and what insight you will gain from doing so.

• It’s anonymous. We don’t ask anything that’s identifiable which allows everyone to feel confident to give their honest feedback 
• It’s low cost. We don’t want cost to be a barrier and that’s why it starts from just $1,000 a month for businesses with up to 20,000 employees. There is also a free version for small-medium businesses.
• It will provide certainty around how everyone’s doing, so that you’re not flying blind. When you are not working together physically it invariably raises questions and concerns. The fact is that in most organisations some people will be doing great working at home, and others who may be having real struggles. The key thing this study will give you is numbers around that. How many are doing great, how many are struggling and what can you do about it?
• It’s really simple to set up. Let us know your company name, send us your logo and colours we send you a hyperlink to a chat-based survey in your corporate colours that you can send out to your entire team. As soon as you do this your dashbaord starts to populate and we send you a link to access it. All within days, or even hours of setting it up.
• You get a lot of really useful data – including qualitative insight and verbatums from staff, summarised using a number of AI tools
• It’s designed to allow you to skim through the findings for a quick overview, whilst also giving you all the tools you need to dive deep into the findings with a number of filters for each chart and the ability to examine the findings for any period of time
• Benchmarks! See how your results compare with others
• You can track how things are changing over time. This survey is designed to be a regular pulse so that you can see how things like sentiment, wellbeing, anxieties and productivity change over time. Right now we suggest sending it out weekly, once things settle you can wind this back to fortnightly, monthly or even quarterly when things return to ‘normal’.
• It will help you to manage the return to centralised work. In the first weeks of running of this we saw a of uncertainty and concern, but we also see that there are many things that people enjoy about working from home. It will be important to understand this so you can, perhaps, learn what to hang on to when working remotely is no longer a requirment
• It provides a measure of social distancing for those who are on site. If you have teams who are working in an office, a distrubution centre, or customer facing role, you can measure how well they are able to observe social distancing in the workplace, and how well they see others doing the same.
• It’s practical and action oriented. Employees are asked what practical support they need, what training or software support they need and what emotional or social supppor they need. They are also asked to give general feedback to the leadership team, and of course how effective communications have been
• It’s international. You can send the same link to staff in different office around the world, so long as they are English speaking, so that you can compare results across different regions and offices.

For a short survey there is really a lot here.