When the coronavirus pandemic hit, no one was prepared; employers and employees alike were all caught unawares, and we had to rely on knee-jerk responses to survive the times. One such response to the global health crisis was a rapid shift to remote work. Due to widespread restrictions on work and travel, businesses had to shift their “worksite” temporarily to anywhere people found themselves amid the health crisis.
Fast forward a year and a half since the pandemic began, remote work seems to be gaining massive acceptance. Many businesses are not letting go of this idea of work any time soon, and others have decided to embed it into their new work model indefinitely.
While employees are glad, on the one hand, that they get to work on their times, for the most part, and in the comfort of their homes or the coffee shop, the fatigue that comes with teleworking is not as tolerable as they had imagined.
Remote workers are experiencing unprecedented levels of job-related stress since work shifted from the office. A recent survey by global employment platform Monster found that 69 percent of workers report experiencing burnout symptoms while working from home, up nearly 20 percent from a similar survey in May.
For many of these remote workers, working from home all or most of the times has come with a number of challenges, including unclear job expectations, working longer hours, job security concerns, and a lack of social support. These factors areinterfering with remote work productivity and may snowball into a huge crisis for the workplace if left unckecked.
What Employers Can Do
Employers have a pivotal role to play to achieve a successful remote work. With hundreds of business owners launching remote or hybrid work patterns, employers must adopt these key strategies to prevent remote work fatigue.
Communicate clearly
Working remotely without the required tools or information is a recipe for disaster. Employees are bound to feel more stressed working from home than in their offices when they are made to navigate through unclear work goals and terms.
One of the most areas where clear communication is required to drive successful telework is in creating boundaries between work time and personal time clear. One of the major concerns remote workers report about telework is unclear boundaries between work and personal hours. This leaves workers with an unhealthy transition between work and personal time.
Further, managers and supervisors need to clarify priority tasks from the get-go. Communicate clearly with your workers what tasks need to be completed when and what goals each task must achieve. This helps workers understand their task requirements before they commence.
A part of setting clear tasks and goals is assigning work to employees that have the skills and training to complete those tasks. In cases where an employee may not be well suited for a task, ample training and resources should be provided to achive optimal results. Trying to fit the wrong employee into the wrong job description would leave them fatigued and unproductive.
Maintain flexibility
Working from home may sound as easy as working in the comfort of your couch any time you want and with as many breaks as you’d love to have, but it is not as simple as this. With remote work comes regular interference between personal and work activities: you need to perform home chores, provide child care, take care of your spouses, or even perform other activities outside of work. Employees face a constant clash of these parts of their lives as they try to work remotely and this easily overwhelm them and cause a lot of stress
This phenomenon is inevitable; as long as workers work from home, they’d be constantly faced with a stiff competition between pressing home demands and work tasks. One way employers can address this situation is allow ample time for workers to meet these competing demands. You can allow your workers an extra day off even while working remotely to allow them meet other demands at home.
Further, employers must tailor work schedules based on employees’ individual needs and not just make it a blanket policy. Some tasks may be more challenging to execute remotely, potentially exposing these workers to higher stress levels and lower productivity levels if they are forced to work from home.
On the other hand, while some jobs can be comfortably done remotely, it helps to model an employee’s work pattern based on what they find most effective for them. Some employees may prefer to work from home all the time, and others may prefer a hybrid arrangement, allowing them to work from home for some days in a week.
Create a feedback loop system
You need to know your employee’s challenges with remote work to address them, and this is why a feedback loop system is essential. This system allows workers express their concerns and problems with remote work, aiding managers and supervisors to determine what areas need to be address to optimize telework productivity.
Employees report higher stress levels from remote work for several reasons, including inadequate ergonomic conditions, inadequate communication channels, less collaboration, and mental health challenges from the isolation that comes with remote work. Some also cite lack of access to the right technology driving workplace stress and fatigue.
Having access to these data helps HR managers to rethink strategies to otpimize employee productivity, including offering better training, providing ergonomic tools, or creating safe channels to ensure workers collaborate and interact more often.
Reinvent wellness offerings
Preventing employee remote work fatigue also requires professional intervention. Some workers just need more mental health support to be better equipped to deal with the challenges of remote work. Some need better access to their employee wellness programs, which have been shuttered since the office doors closed.
This is where you need to revisit your employee assistance programs.
In many organizations, workplace wellness initiatives had been on hold since office doors were shuttered. This has largely left employees navigating the pandemic without adequate wellness support. In the context of remote work, employers can pivot wellness initiatives to increase workers’ access to them. This comes as virtual offerings, including access to online yoga classes, online gym sessions, and telemental health services.
Employers should also provide enough financial support for their workers as the health crisis continues to plunge workers in serious financial difficulties. The economic impact of the pandemic is also increasing workplace stress for many employees. You may, therefore, need to review their benefit and compensation plans and provide them with access to resources and tools on financial literacy.
Conclusion
Remote work has become the dominant work model since the pandemic disrupted the corporate world less than two years ago. Employers are now considering making this a permanent work structure, allowing employees to work from home all or most of the time. However, working from home is not the same as working from the office. Employees face multiple challenges working from home that heighten their stress levels and keep them fatigued. Pivoting workplace solutions to mitigate these concerns is, therefore, necessary to improve employee health and promote an optimal telework model.
