How to Facilitate the Transition to Remote Operations with Digital Transformation

In recent years, employers and employees alike have woken up to the benefits of remote work. This has brought about a veritable revolution on a global scale, with organizations everywhere embracing shifting away from traditional on-site models in favor of more flexible and modular teams.

In many ways, switching to a digital workplace can be a boon to a business, for instance by reducing operating costs and enabling access to a wider talent pool. While many have tried to make the transition to remote operations, however, research indicates that only around 16% of companies have succeeded in going fully remote. In my view, this is down to the innate challenges of remote work, chiefly as it pertains to employee development, motivation, and productivity.

So, as an entrepreneur, how can you overcome these issues to succeed with remote work? To my mind, the answer lies in digital transformation. Here, I’ll explain exactly how, highlighting some key technologies that can help your company can implement to facilitate the transition to remote operations.

Employee development

When companies operate remotely, employee development often proves a major sticky point. While a physical office environment allows employees to have ease of access to company resources and the ability to maintain a constant dialogue with HR, remote employees often suffer from a lack of adequate support. This can make it difficult to onboard new staff with essential tools or upskill existing staff, and often leads to companies retreating into the familiar confines of their brick-and-mortar offices. There is a solution to this issue, however, and that is to implement digital adoption platforms as part of your change management strategy.

Digital adoption platforms are software solutions designed to create more engaging learning experiences for employees. By integrating with existing software, DAPs can overlay on top of the tools that employees are training with to provide real-time, contextual guidance that helps them reach proficiency more quickly and seamlessly. By utilizing DAPs for virtual onboarding and remote employee development, your organization can provide engaging personalized training experiences to employees, enabling remote teams to achieve the proficiencies necessary to bring real value to your enterprise.

Motivation

Companies that attempt the transition to remote operations often cite a lack of engagement as a reason for bringing employees back to the office. Of course, when your workforce is off-site, it’s natural that some employees might begin to feel disconnected from their roles, and this can impact performance. However, it is possible to drive motivation remotely by leveraging the power of employee engagement platforms.

Employee engagement platforms are innovative solutions designed to help employers motivate teams through incentivization and reward. These platforms utilize point-based systems whereby employees can earn rewards through exceptional performance. By leveraging these tools, you can effectively gamify the working experience for your employees and create a positive feedback loop in which excellence and continuous improvement are incentivized. This can empower you to create a positive remote working culture that your employees are eager to participate in, boosting the morale and performance of your workforce and allowing your enterprise to reach its organizational goals with greater velocity.

Productivity

With employees working off-site, the issue of remote productivity is always bound to rear its head, and this can be a delicate matter in many ways. On one hand, you want to ensure that your employees are performing at the level expected of them, but on the other, you’re reluctant to stifle them with constant invasive update requests and check-ins. In many cases, this dilemma causes companies to question their decision to go remote, but recalling an entire staff is not the answer and could even exacerbate the problem by souring employee relations. Rather, the solution is to implement workforce analytics and productivity software.

With workforce analytics and productivity software, you can monitor how employees are using their work computers in real time. This allows you to track their application usage and gauge productivity based on the time spent using different apps. Additionally, you can categorize applications that you consider productive or unproductive, allowing you to know at a glance whether or not your remote employees are using their time efficiently. However, the benefits don’t just extend to you as the employer, as these tools always enable employees to see their usage and gain insights into how they might become more efficient in their work. As such, workforce analytics and productivity software can help you ensure that you are getting the most out of your remote employees.

Final thoughts

Companies the world over are attempting to transition to remote work, and for good reason, as there is plenty to be gained from establishing a digital workplace. However, the success rate of these transitions is lower than it ought to be, and much of this failure can be attributed to difficulties organizations encounter when striving to manage employee development, motivation, and productivity. To succeed in making the jump to remote operations at your business, you should seek to embrace digital transformation by incorporating cutting-edge software tools into your approach to these issues. In doing so, you will create a more progressive, engaging, and dynamic workplace that is equipped to succeed in remote work.