As your business changes and adapts, your strategy needs to be updated and implemented. However, during this particular time of transition, this process can pose additional challenges that need to be overcome.
Implement New Business Strategies While Staying At Home
Implementing business strategies boils down to five steps:
1. Communicate the strategy
2. Assign implementation steps to specific leaders
3. Ensure a timeline is established and followed
4. Track statistics before, during, and after implementation
5. Create a reporting structure to ensure the whole process is completed
These steps have their own challenges and substeps that must be tackled to complete a successful implementation.
However, with employees working from home, there are additional aspects of the operation which must be recognized and overcome. These are:
Accountability
With many employees (team leads included) working from home while also holding other hats, it can be difficult for teams to maintain accountability. Many employees have become full-time caregivers of children or elderly family members while also worrying about their health and overwhelming and stressful news reports. Some may also now be the sole breadwinner for their family.
This is all to say that many employees are distracted right now. With that distraction comes a need for more accountability.
The solution is to add accountability to all of your processes and strategies. This can be overcome with processes like providing timelines, making reporting and check-ins both routine and easy, as well as providing ways to share the burden of a heavy workload.
Virtual meetings, rapid reporting systems, and internal team meetings/coordination can all go far in ensuring accountability and allowing team members to distribute their workload more evenly as they participate in strategy and process implementation.
Clarity
Because you are discussing your strategy over a longer distance, it can be more complicated than ever for employees and leads to come up with cogent questions and to report challenges.
With this in mind, it is crucial to communicate your strategy clearly and concisely. You should provide the full strategy to your team members so they can read it, along with a summary of the most important goals and the end result which will be attained. Then have meetings to go over it, assign targets, and set timelines. Timelines and target assignments should also be stated in writing in a location accessible to all those on the implementation team.
This clear and dynamic process can be done with a team working from home; it simply needs to be well-documented and transparent for all team members.
Communication
Clear communication is vital in every aspect of leading a team that is working from home. Your expectations must be clearly stated and documented.
Not only does verbal communication need to occur in meetings, but written communication that can be accessed by all applicable team members is a must during this time. If you are not used to assigning tasks in writing, you must get into that habit as no one can come to your office to hash things out, and setting up a meeting is not as easy as walking down to the conference room.
Communicate clearly and ensure accountability as everyone works from home. You will be amazed at all of the challenges that can be overcome!
Are you ready to implement strategies and create clear processes and procedures for your company? Contact Business Success Consulting Group. We are here to work with you and your team as you lead your company to success.
