It is no news that for the company and its employees to be successful, there is a need for human communication. A one-on-one meeting which is a regular meeting between two people - an employee and its manager is used for feedback, solving any issues and further improvement in the company. Such meetings are essential to the employee’s development. They create a trusting relationship between a manager and the employee without focusing on the differences between status. During the one-on-one meeting, the employee can ask any questions that bother him or her, have a clear vision of what needs to be done next while the manager will better understand the employee which will result in a more productive and successful working environment in the whole organization. Moving forward, here are the top 5 benefits of one-on-one meetings and the reasons you should try them out.

The first benefit which up to now has probably already become obvious is that a one-on-one meeting strengthens the relationship between a leader and the employee. Very often an employee fears the manager and thinks that he or she is the worst part of the job. More regular productive communication which involves emotional engagement and honest care could change this idea. Both employee and manager will help each other improve in their job, solve any problems and just have a good time talking like friends. A gap between the management and regular employees should not become a reason that one looks down on another.

The second benefit of the meeting is that it delivers valuable, personalized feedback for the employee. A one-on-one meeting gives enough attention and time to dive into the performance of one specific employee. It doesn’t include only the problems, but also is focused on what achievements the employee has reached and what is the vision of future work. The manager looks at the details, gives thought through advice and the employee may continue working better.

In addition, a one-on-one meeting may help review if the performance of the employee aligns with the goals and objectives of the organization. The manager can carefully look over what the employee has done and if their work fits the business priorities. A performance management system is a must in a successful company. Doing it through a personalized meeting on a bigger scale may make the employee community more aligned with the company and conscious of what needs to be done to succeed.
Let’s not forget that a one-on-one meeting improves team loyalty since employees start trusting the leader which is very important. When a manager meets with an employee personally many times, it builds a foundation for following and supporting the decisions of the leader. An employee’s trust means that the company’s management has a whole supportive community behind which together will achieve the organization’s goals.

For the last one, a one-on-one meeting helps the managers pick out and ask the right questions which eventually help boost employee’s productivity. The manager can figure out what tasks or activities need more attention or what work can be done for the employee to grow in his or her position and overall career. The overview gives the employee a clear path to growth which essentially means higher productivity. Every person working in any company wants to learn how they can develop and do more, become better at what they do. On the other hand, the manager learns how to evaluate the employee the best and make sure they can perform at their best.

One-on-one meetings bring forward a way to improve human communication in the company. They also boost both the work of the employees and relationships between them and the management. I’d recommend trying them out and seeing if the positive changes appear in the company just by adding a small new detail to the daily routine.

Employee branding is a relatively new term that focuses on how current or potential employees perceive the company. The idea is to have employees that are on board with the brand values and continue further to express the messages of the values and vision of the organization to other employees and stakeholders. Employee branding is a perfect way to attract candidates and prospects choosing jobs from a few companies. Also, organizations which implement employee branding have their employees perform as brand ambassadors. Employee loyalty is higher, they contribute to brand reputation management, helping the company attract new talent. Employee branding is useful to develop for a few reasons. It increases the online visibility of the brand due to the employee’s online presence as brand ambassadors, improves employee productivity and engagement making their working environment better and giving space for career advancement and personal growth.

There is a term employer branding which is similar to employee branding, however, they do differ. Let’s look at the main differences so you do not mix them up in the future. Employer branding is driven by the human resources team and executive employees who are in charge of the company’s vision. It focuses on the work culture, benefits in the company as well as career advancement opportunities while employee branding focuses on the communication and connection that employees have with the company and what it does. It is important to work on employer branding because it also influences how well employee branding will do.

Building employee branding takes time and creating the strategy requires effort and refinement. One of the most important things to start off is for the company to have a mission statement with the vision and goals and to live them out every single day. The values have to be taught and promoted so employees believe in them and truly want to raise awareness of the brand.
In addition, it is crucial to understand the employee and candidate experience because employees should be able to share everything they feel about the company. That is why it would be useful to organize activities inside the company that can improve employee satisfaction, get people excited about the brand and increase retention.
Thirdly, communication is an integral part of any company and there should be a clear strategy for informing employees and sharing with them company updates as well as values and mission. This is done by creating an employee communication strategy by the executives and using technology that helps communicate out all the information successfully.
For the employees to become successful brand ambassadors, the company could use brand training. Workshops would teach employees how to communicate about the brand and also improve in their careers. This would make the organization closer and develop the necessary connection between employees and the company brand.
Creating an amazing employee brand happens only when the company listens to the feedback from employees. They can tell the most about what is good or bad in the company, how they perceive the brand and experience work. All of this can be answered by creating surveys for employees and a comfortable working environment where people can openly share their opinion.

Last but not least, social media is a powerful tool that further extends the reach of employee branding. It is beneficial to encourage employees to share about their work experience on social media because it may make them feel more motivated and excited as well as inspire others. It also works perfectly for the company itself. Employee posts may motivate other people to apply for the company as well as increase marketing and sales because people want to work in companies that care about them and where they feel happy. Social media is still growing so using every chance to leverage it will bring more success to the company and its employees.

Working for a company that values and rewards its people may boost your motivation and general attitude about your job. Understanding how to encourage and retain employees who are satisfied with their employment is aided by learning about employee appreciation and the difference it can make. In general, recognition is a special act of recognizing and rewarding the company’s employees for their work ethics, contributions that they made to the company, and overall advancement. According to Harvard Business Review, making employees feel more appreciated and supported might benefit the individual and the company as a whole. Recently, another survey was conducted by Workhuman and the results were pretty surprising. For example, according to the survey employee appreciation had a direct beneficial effect on retention in 68 percent of businesses. On the other hand, 51 percent of the employees are thinking of quitting their current job and searching for a new one, simply because they do not receive recognition. In this article, we will discuss four different types of employee appreciation, their effectiveness, and their effect on the workers.

Day-to-day recognition

Celebrating employees’ success daily might be beneficial not only for the workers themselves but also for the managers since they would get to know their colleagues better and create stronger bonds. Employee appreciation and acknowledgment should be accessible, decentralized, and regular on a daily basis. Sometimes workers are accomplishing small things which should be appreciated and not always the central leadership may notice it. In this case, managers must express regular gratitude since the manager-employee connection is vital to the employee experience.
The following things may potentially trigger day-to-day appreciation, for example, if the employee is helping other teammates, actively reaching his targets and pursuing leads, showing his leadership within the company, and speaking at companies or other important events. The main question is how a manager can show appreciation towards his employee? Start with a simple “thank you”, since sometimes the power of words is underestimated, but sometimes it can make a difference. You may send a note of gratitude or give a public shout-out, either in the office or online in your team chat.

Informal recognition

Informal acknowledgment sometimes may look similar to the day-to-day one, but it should occur only when it is deserved. Informal “prizes” should be unique, spontaneous, meaningful, and consistent. When to give informal recognition? Some of the situation examples may include: an employee overachieving his monthly targets, delivering better results than initially anticipated or a manager can try a “spot recognition” method. This approach seems to work pretty nicely among the various companies, it is given to a worker for a specific behavior, contribution, or when milestones appeared. What is more, you can show appreciation to your employees straight away or whenever you think it would be the perfect time for it.
On the other hand, you may offer your worker flexible hours, or a day off. Informal recognitions are useful and easy to implement, especially if your company prepares for you a list of criteria that you can use in order to evaluate your worker’s efforts.

Formal recognition

Formal employee recognition should also be linked to a remarkable employee achievement or milestone and should be accompanied by a meaningful and significant reward. Formal employee recognition, in contrast to day-to-day appreciation or informal recognition, is centralized, which means it normally exists inside a defined program and is overseen by your Human Resources or People Operations teams. Most organizations develop their own unique recognition programs, but the core values are similar. For instance, a company should be realistic and create measurable objectives, analyze programs' effectiveness, ask you, employees, for feedback and improve it if needed, lastly, sharing success stories around the company, may motivate workers to participate and even make them more passionate about theory occupation. The formal recognition award should be given to the employee if he has done some significant work, demonstrates his passion for the company and its values, or if he brainstorms and implements new ideas within the team.

Bonuses

Everyone is familiar with bonuses and always tries to get them, the company’s employees are no exception. However, there are multiple kinds of bonuses that can be given to your worker. incentive bonuses include referral and retention bonuses. Employees who propose candidates for available positions receive referral bonuses, which leads to the hiring of these individuals. On the other hand retention bonuses are given to the valued employees in order to show the company’s gratitude towards them, their loyalty, and hard work.
Performance bonuses are also widely used in many companies and employees are rewarded with them for their outstanding work and contributions. Such bonuses may be given to the individual or even to the team or the whole department. Performance bonuses can be given in the form of a gift card, cash, stock options, or even a small holiday trip.

Communication is a very significant factor at work because it controls the flow of work and is directly correlated to what the company and employees achieve. When there are disturbances in communication, miscommunication appears which then disrupts the normal patterns of work and can shake people out of their work flow. This is a serious thing that has to be addressed, solved and improved so communication remains effective in the future. From workplace statistics, a high 28% of employees see poor communication as the reason for not delivering work results. In addition, 97% of employees think that communication impacts the efficacy of their tasks on a daily basis. As it can be seen, great communication has major importance for employees so it has to be established. However, first we need to find out what actually causes miscommunication at work and then we can add some ideas on how to fix it.

The first cause of miscommunication is lack of context. Context in business means the background or environment surrounding an occurrence. It gives clarification and purpose for any responsibilities or tasks to be done. When something has to be done, for example, a report presentation of an event. Firstly, there has to be context of the event that the presentation will be about, formality of the presenter, and audience. Without these details, the whole task could waste a lot of time, money and be done completely wrong. Lack of context can damage relationships and lead to business failure. To prevent miscommunication happening this way, the employees should be given enough time to ask all the important questions and give their work for review.

The second cause of miscommunication is false assumptions. Assumptions happen when something is thought to be true but is not verified. Such instances happen in business when making decisions because some things are standardized, however, it is not always the time to assume especially when it may relate to specific details such as the wishes of the consumer. A good amount of research has to be done along with a clearly known context to avoid failure through assumptions. At work, to avoid this you should confirm anything you heard and also precisely use your own words so it does not cause disbalances in communication.

The third cause of miscommunication is the lack of engaged active listening. It is crucial to learn to actively pay attention to the person who is talking to you. We are mostly focused on thinking when we will talk or what we will say and this further in the line can create a lot of miscommunication. Active listening means that we are able to concentrate on what another person is saying, hear the words that we need to hear and proactively respond if anything is unclear. Overall, to fix this common communication problem, you should get rid of all the distractions such as phones by switching off notifications and putting them away and fully focus on the listener. Make eye contact, carefully listen and finally ask questions to make sure your understanding is complete. The more you become an active listener, the better you will understand people and make them feel like you actually listen to every single word.

As the last cause of miscommunication, the medium of internal communication is a great one. Now with the rise of remote work, the options for communication have drastically increased. You can pick in-person meetings, video meetings, email, LinkedIn messages, Slack, phone calls or texts and in-app messaging. It is very important for the company or the team to figure out which channel suits the best for specific needs. When the wrong one is chosen, messages can be lost and communication can be disrupted. The employees may not feel comfortable in the communication channel or use it carelessly especially when a few channels at once are used. To fix this problem, the team has to agree on the norms of the communication channel and what channels will be used for which conversations. This may differ a lot from company to company so I need to choose wisely.

Miscommunication can be caused by multiple things, however, just as easily it can also be fixed. It is crucial to remember that communication at work has to flow smoothly because only this way successful work results will be achieved. Communication is an integral part of any process so to assure that internally and externally it operates well, the ideas mentioned in the article have to be implemented.

It is not easy to be a leader to your employees and lead by example. There are qualities that need to be developed which take time and dedication. However, a strong, smart and skillful manager and leader is needed for any company or employee team to succeed. A bad boss will demotivate employees and bring chaos to the workplace while a good one will increase the productivity of everyone and maintain the engagement of people. Work is such a big part of our lives so everything needs to be done to make it a beneficial and motivating experience. Employees will have hard times in their work and will want to feel the support from the manager while the manager will want to maintain a healthy and successful work culture inspiring people around. Having and being an ideal boss goes both ways so this article will give some tips on how to become a leader that everyone wants to see.

Everything starts from the most important thing which is having a clear vision. There is no way to become a good boss and leader if you do not know where your team or company is heading. A company without a clear direction is deemed to fail so all the vision, mission, goals, duties of people and departments have to be seen with eagle focus. The clear vision of the boss will then transfer to the employees who will then be able to be more successful and productive.

Going straight after the first point, the manager should care about the well-being of the employees and always be available to them. There can always be situations when employees are facing some problems so having the manager accessible means a lot to them. The work environment is healthy when the employees trust the boss which then helps them be more engaged. In addition to this, an ideal manager makes sure that the working conditions of employees include things such as competitive salaries, benefits, opportunities for development and flexible work. This way the employee is happy and the manager holds his image as a leader who can take care of his company and people.

Empathy and honesty are important traits needed to lead a group of people. A boss should not only be strict and disciplined, but also feel a connection with people and show empathy. This is why a manager could share personal stories or experiences with employees, showing their human side. Strengthening the ties between top management and the people would make the employees more relaxed, help them see the human side of the manager and even have a personal mentor. The ideal leader leads both through strength and empathy so it’s safe to say that having a connection to the employees gives real strength to a boss.

Talking from the technical side of character traits, an ideal boss should be decisive and make decisions swiftly. This corresponds to a strong leader who doesn’t get lost in different worries and questions. Those who are indecisive never appear strong or receive support from others. The ability to account for small details, think through everything and go through with the decision requires a good demand of mental will and strength. When employees see a manager who doesn’t tremble when unknown questions and problems arise, they straight away put their trust in him or her.

To finish off this list of tips for an ideal boss, a great manager has to set high standards for work and track as well as evaluate goal achievements. The company and the teams that work in it in the end are focused on achieving big things so the employees have to see a person who takes the stand to produce real results. Talking about success is one thing, but it is purely defined by being proactive. First the bosses set goals for themselves and then they take care of the employees, manage their efficiency and make sure that everyone is on point with their work. Employees should not forget that hard work has to be put in and the only person who can motivate them to do it is the manager. That is what successful leadership is.

Not long ago project management included people working in a physical environment. However, now when remote work is the new normal, everything has to be successfully managed online. This is a challenge since the remote team consists of people working in different locations and using different tools so project managers have to make sure that good collaboration and productivity remain.
There are many benefits of having remote project management. The numerous remote project management tools which help teams have productive work and project managers to monitor the work without interrupting. Planning tools give teams detailed descriptions of the work, it can be managed easier so all of this empowers teams leading to better productivity.

Having a remote project team means that you will save money without the office space and utilities. The money then can be allotted to salaries and growing the business. The employees also save money since they do not have to commute anymore.
Working in a remote project team means that there will be a better work-life balance for the employees. It will lead to happier workers which will essentially boost productivity and the management will be able to recruit people easier.
Also, reporting on performance and progress is one of the traits of remote project management. Collaborating remotely builds stronger relations, and decision making is improved by reporting.

There are some steps that can be taken to build the process of remote project management from the basics.
It would be smart to start by figuring out what kind of working structure the team will have, either fully remote or hybrid. Along with that, the members of the starting team should become acquainted with the objectives and goals of the project. It would be useful to have a call or online meeting with each person to explain their roles more precisely and the details of the project.

Secondly, it is important to hire the people with the right skills. Remote work requires motivation and proactivity since the project manager cannot babysit everyone remotely. Starting with a dedicated and strong team will give a good headstart and a strong foundation for the remaining project.
Let’s not forget the significance of frequent communication. Remote work means that it is not possible to just chat with the person sitting next to you. Project managers have to use techniques such as virtual meetings, instant messaging or regular phone calls. Keeping in touch with the employees will give an opportunity to provide feedback and make some changes as well as increase the motivation of the team to continue successfully working.

To make sure that employees don’t slack on their work, project managers have to keep them accountable. This is done by giving roles and responsibilities to each member of the team and establishing deadlines for tasks to be completed. A good idea also is to create a communication channel on an app and monitor how everyone is working and what are the tasks for the week or day.

As a final point, project visibility has to be maintained by using project management software that will create an easily accessible and central location which will be visible to the entire team and which everyone can access. Shared spaces are important for the success of the project because they improve collaboration, visibility and communication and multiple teams can access different documents and information. Seeing results and the whole process will further motivate both the employees and project managers to continue working and meeting deadlines.

Working from home is still a relatively new idea that started getting popular when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world two years ago. Many people went online with their jobs and even if the benefits of working from your bedroom or home office seemed clear, there were also hardships of staying focused at home and being productive. People realized that working remotely is not as easy as it looks and requires preparation. Even after 2 years of living in the pandemic, finally having the chance to fully get back to normal life, remote work will not disappear and will remain relevant. People have already felt what it is like to have flexibility in their lives and easier to combine personal responsibilities such as hobbies and family with work. This article will introduce 5 simple, easily understandable tips on how to create the perfect remote working day so you can be the most productive and happy.

Starting the day early

This is simple but hard advice. Most of you imagine the perfect morning as waking up very early, meditating, writing a journal, eating a well-balanced breakfast and then drinking coffee, catching up with all the news. However, in reality while working remotely you wake up and straight away take your phone since you become used to checking your phone constantly, catching up with colleagues from other countries or places and then looking at your computer screen. This way your priorities are forgotten and you can then notice how your day is a complete mess and you do not know how to fix it.

The best approach to establish a good start to the day is to plan the whole morning the night before and strictly stick to the plan. Tasks that are not urgent can be scheduled for different times later in the day. If everything seems tight and you cannot finish tasks on time, you could wake up earlier in the morning to be more proactive. In the end, it is important to smoothly start your mornings and when feeling stressed take a 5 minute break from your work.

Decide where you will be working

You may imagine a perfect day working remotely in a coffee shop or a coworking office, sipping coffee and having a relaxing background with some classic music playing. If not in a coffee shop, there are always expectations of a home office which is picture perfect. However, working in coffee shops has many downsides such as the amount of people and sounds, coworking places are expensive and working from home has distractions since there are other people in the house and sometimes you do not even want to get out of bed in the first place.
Realistically, you should first invest in your home office if that is where you will be working. Buy a desk and create an office space that will make you feel inspired. If you feel like you want a coworking place, try to find places that charge less for the membership or ask your company to cover it for you stating the reason that you are more productive working remotely like that. In addition, to find calm places to work in the city, you could join forums or Facebook groups for remote works and ask people there. The most important thing is to keep trying new ways to work so that in the end you find the most appropriate way for you.

Prioritizing tasks

It is important to plan out your tasks and maximize productivity at the highest level. It seems that you can just come up with the list of priorities to make everything easier. However, the to-do list can become stressful and watery, by thinking that a lot of things are important it can become never ending and only make your productivity worse. That’s why you should experiment with productivity techniques that are accessible online. They are not the secret to success and cannot give a fast fix to every problem but they may give ideas on how to construct your daily tasks and some “hacks” may seem closer to the heart. If it is still hard to pick out tasks of highest priority then it would be useful to decide which tasks are not a priority. This will save time and it will be more comfortable selecting the important things.

Clear your head from technologies through deep work

From the outside it may seem that working at home frees you from all the interruptions that happen in offices. The photos and videos online show you that it is a dream and your productivity rises to the highest level. However, what people forget is that being at home all the time means a lot of distractions from technological devices such as smartphones, buzzing with social media notifications, text messages and phone calls. Learning how to control your digital activities is essential to a productive day. Luckily, the devices that we use can give you the tools to do it. There are many apps that can block specific sites or apps for a specific amount of time which can help you focus. Working with interruptions will weaken your mental strength and productivity levels eventually will plummet. You may also follow the basic principles of digital minimalism, reducing your technology use during the day, which will give you the habit to not check social media continually and pick up your phone every few minutes. Everyone needs digital detox which gains a lot more significance when talking about remote work.

Maintain a healthy work-life balance

The internet shows a specific perspective of remote work where you work as much as you want, have time to relax on the beach, do yoga and read many books. It may seem that remote work will give you a lot of free time to do the things you want such as spending more time with family, engaging in your hobbies. The dedicated and hard working person in you does very differently. When you start working remotely, you use every minute for work because you believe that this way you will gain a headstart and do more, you have push notifications flowing throughout the day which keeps reminding you to work and you just hope that somehow everything will naturally fall into place and suddenly your work-life balance question will be solved.
The only way you will actually have a work-life balance is if you consciously decide on it. You have to put limits on your work and understand that at a specific time in the evening you have to unplug and stop thinking about work related things. You may also one to have one day a week when you have a day off work and do something that brings you pleasure. Remember, it takes a lot of planning and self discipline to put together your day when working by yourself and finding the habits that put you closer to a real work-life balance.

The number of remote employees has drastically increased over the past few years. It is now an essential part of the working environment to onboard and train employees which work fully remotely. That is why it is so important to understand how to best maximize the first part of the work process onboarding people. It is already known that effective onboarding increases the chances of an employee staying in the company longer. The hire retention increases by 82 percent and productivity increases by 70 percent. Finding out how to structure the onboarding process for remote employees may bring a lot of success in the future and become a good standard of how to show the most care for people who work remotely.
A good way to start would be to welcome the new employee to the company and the culture ahead of time. You could create a digital welcome package that may include an invitation to a meeting with the employees, a personalized message, the employee handbook and a digital organization chart. This may help the new employee prepare better and start working with an efficient, productive and happy mind.
The second thing that you would do is connect the employee to the digital workspace in which he or she will be working. A week before create the email address that would be used for all platform logins and be logged in to everything. A good way to help the employee would be to create a video tutorial where the main steps would be explained of the tools that will be needed.

A really efficient way to keep the employee motivated to start working in the company is to create an individualized remote onboarding plan that would include specific goals and videos. The employee will be more productive when he will have specific goals to go for in the work, will have motivation to everyday be ready for work and having meetings with the manager will make everything clearer as well as show support from the company’s side while still being in the initial stage of figuring out everything. It is best to have a long-term concrete plan that will change as the situation changes and the goals of the employee change.

Another way to make the employee get started faster in the job and have a better well-being is to offer work-related courses or training online. This is a good way for the employee to become more useful by expanding knowledge in the field of the work and integrating into the remote working place easier. Online courses will offer a lot of guidance and eventually develop an employee that has a personal growth mindset and is both himself happy and will make the company better. Just don’t forget to give some kind of stipend to the employee for working on courses since this would be very useful for the company and such benefit will greatly satisfy the employee himself.

A fun way to make onboarding overall a better experience for future hires and the company is to create a survey that could be given to current employees to fill out. You could do it through an interview or just by sending a survey which would include multiple-choice questions and open answers to give more elaborate feedback. The questions could be about the most and least successful steps of the onboarding process, when the employee felt excited and when frustrated, the length and the interactions with people in the company. All of this information should be saved digitally, analyzed and used to make future onboarding better.

Lastly, as a creative piece, the onboarding could include interactive and social activities. The company could create videos explaining what it does and include product descriptions, client interviews. A good idea would be to use TikTok for this as there would then be a whole profile that would be shared with the employee. Also, the CEO could record a podcast explaining the story of the company, its services or product, given personal employee stories. You could also make the new employee use his creative skills to create a short introduction video with some photos and share with the colleagues. This would create communication from both sides.

Onboarding is the first step for the employee in the company. It is important to create the best process possible to leave the employee satisfied and the company successful. Even in the time of remote work, it is possible to restructure old practices and to apply them to the online world, making the remote employee happy and motivated.

The work culture of today could not exist without happy employees. There are a number of reasons why happiness is so integral for the company to become successful. Happy employees overall perform better, are more engaged and support what the company does. Such employees make the company more profitable and the turnover is much lower. If employees are not happy, productivity levels fall rapidly and also it costs a lot to replace the employee with a new one. You should start caring about employee happiness because happy employees when they do not feel stress and anxiety make smarter decisions, workers who are unhappy are more likely to leave the job position, customer service is executed more effectively by employees with a better attitude, happy employees are more creative and can make their colleagues happier.

Work-life balance

It is very important to start from the most simple and basic thing which is the work-life balance. Every person wants to manage their work so it complements their personal life and doesn’t cause any necessary stress that can disrupt regular life. Creating a workspace which allows the employee to manage their work and life effectively is significant to happy employees. Chronic stress due to long work hours, pressure or overtime hours lead to burnout and anxiety. Some ways that you could avoid this and make your employees feel the best are by offering flexible work options such as remote work sometimes, let them take breaks at work, give volunteering opportunities, review the workload of employees or increase support packages for hard times.

Building a positive work environment

The work environment that the employee works in has to be positive because it directly affects him or her. When you spend most of your day in one place, you of course wish for it to vibrate good emotions and happiness. It is important to be open about any problems and maintain dialogue throughout the organization. In addition, there could be training that teaches the employees more about the company or even some social activities which include the whole company and makes everyone play games or have fun. In the end, all it matters is for the employees to be able to smile in their work every day.

Encourage breaks between work sessions

Working hard is important as long as you do not overwork. This can lead to burnout and a lot of unhappiness. What managers should do is encourage employees to take a break from work. They either work very hard to prove their results so as to get a snack, take a walk, have lunch, talk with the colleague or just get outside the office. This will clear the mind of the employees and bring the focus to continue working productively.

Show gratefulness

While working a lot and focusing on the company’s operations, it is possible to forget how much the employees are actually working and what value they actually bring. They may become unhappy because they don’t feel engagement from the top management and feel like there is no recognition which eventually makes them leave. A good thing for the managers to do is to periodically praise something that the employees have done or do good. Saying thank you to a person who works hard can make a big difference and give a lot of motivation and positive energy.

Mindfulness meditation

The last tip may seem weird and maybe not belonging here but it is definitely a crucial point. Many people and especially employees get stuck in their heads too much and do not get a mental break. Science has already proved the effect mindfulness meditation has on raising happiness levels, helping people enjoy the present moment more and increasing focus by minimizing stress. You can give such meditation to employees by providing access to a mindfulness app which can guide them throughout the process, give a planned break for light breathing meditation to clear their heads or just to play some natural music while employees close their eyes. A perfect solution would be to have a special meditation room where employees would have to come from time to time and practice mindfulness. All of this would definitely change the mood of workers and increase their happiness.

Good communication and an efficient work process have always been a part of any job. There have to be tools or processes available that systemically structure how the work plays out. In the office environment, this is done by actual meetings in the office, direct communication between colleagues and emailing. The remote work environment functions a lot differently. When working remotely, there is a need for different software that allow for meetings to happen, work processes and results to be monitored and that gives tools to manage communication and work operations.

Slack

Slack is one of the best online communication tools for remote work in the professional world. It offers the possibility to communicate with specific people one on one or in rooms which are group conversations. For those that like and use Facebook Messenger, Slack will be perfect since it is the work synonym of Facebook. It is also a flexible app because it supports asynchronous work. It means that when working in channels you can access all the information at any given time comfortable for you. Finally, the app is inclusive. Everyone in the company can access the same searchable and shared information. Employees stay connected and channels give an opportunity to make decisions faster and manage the working process better. However, remember that since it is an online communication app, the number of conversations or groups may become overwhelming and could pose a distraction to work so be mindful of that.

Trello

Trello is a productivity and work management app that tracks team projects, highlights tasks and monitors the whole process until completion. It is based on the principles of Kanban that uses project boards to organize the workflow tasks and have an overview of the whole project. The main components of trello are boards, cards and lists. It starts from boards which focus on a project, the lists in each board indicate the progress of the project and individual cards in lists have information about specific tasks. This tool is great for remote team management because it separates the tasks in stages and allows for asynchronous communication through individual commenting. The app is free from the start with paid plans starting at $10.

Zoom

Probably everyone has tried or at least heard of the virtual meeting software Zoom since the pandemic started in 2020. The popularity of the software surged when the COVID-19 crisis happened. From the start it became one of the leading platforms for online meetings and gained its ground in many companies. Zoom allows you to create virtual meeting rooms for people to communicate through video and audio, you can also share your screen, share files and use text chat while being in the meeting publicly or privately. Zoom platform can be used on the computer desktop or as a mobile app and signing up is free.

Firstbase

This software is relatively new and helps companies set up their workers to do work from anywhere setting up, managing and retrieving the physical equipment. It includes automated onboarding (employees choose the products they want), equipment tracking with the touch of a button, efficient and fast offboarding giving the possibility to retrieve everything and reuse for the future, simple expense management. Firstbase software spins around the remote work revolution and since remote work will not disappear, invites people to seek better experiences for employees and higher quality of life using it.

Crystal

Crystal is an interesting software that helps fix the problem of colleagues not understanding each other in their job or not being acquainted with the personality of the employee. It uses machine learning to predict the DISC (dominant, influential, conscientious and steady) profile through personality tests. It is a great way to find out the personalities of individual employees and how you work together. You can take a free personality test when you sign up on the software and this way you understand the styles of people that you work with in a remote team. Crystal also gives an opportunity to see these results on Gmail and LinkedIn.

Software is an important and integral part of remote work. It helps employees effectively manage their tasks, communicate and overall replace things that should be done in the office. For managers, software means a way of creating a strong and collaborative remote team that knows everything they are doing and stay updated with their colleagues. We wrote a recent article about 5 software that would be great for a remote work team (link to the article is here).

Having read the article, which software do you personally think would make or makes your job the most efficient and time-saving?

Slack
Crystal
Zoom
Firstbase
Trello