How to Make Your Remote Workers More Successful

This is a stressful time. Even without a global pandemic setting us on edge, 42% of employees cite stress on the job due to workload. Now that many of us are working from home, the lines are even more blurred. And with a variety of external factors weighing on us, too, that stress grows exponentially. Managers need to work swiftly and carefully to help their teams organize their workloads and relieve stress. Not prioritizing stress levels can lead to decreased health and low productivity.

But what does a healthy work environment look like during quarantine?

What Makes An Ideal Remote Work Environment

A well-balanced team goes a long way in creating a healthy environment while working remotely. When workload is divided in such a way that leans on individual strengths, while supporting each other’s weaknesses together, the stress of feeling overwhelmed and overworked is reduced. The Caliper Four Box is a great way to structure your teams in a way that assigns all the right personalities to a role where they’ll thrive and meld together into a cohesive unit. Key personalities are needed in order to prop up the team from within, and the Caliper Four Box ensures that the right person is placed in the right role for a sound foundation.

Managers also need to ensure that they facilitate communication and transparency. Poor communication costs the average organization more than 62 million dollars per year in productivity. But beyond productivity, it’s just frustrating. It becomes easier to  properly manage team communications and lead with the appropriate level of transparency by exercising emotional intelligence, which can be leveraged amongst individual team members, too. Encouraging teammates to key into each other’s needs, do their part, and reach out for help when needed will create an environment of support, strength, and productivity growth.

How the Caliper Profile Makes it Possible

Well-balanced teams are ones that leverage the innate strengths of individuals and place people in roles that lean on those strengths. The Caliper Profile helps managers better understand the strengths, inclinations, and competencies of their team members. Using the assessment reports, managers can align, develop, and coach to specific skills that will build more robust, well-rounded teams.

Our new Remote Worker job model uses the Caliper Essentials Competency Reports and helps managers understand 4 key aspects behind managing remote workers: Description of their core competencies, how to coach them based on those competencies, how they can best work on their own professional development, and how to hire remote workers.

Understanding Remote Worker Competencies

The Caliper Remote Worker Job Model helps frame the key personality traits necessary to be successful in that setting, while allowing managers to get a well-rounded view of the strengths and weaknesses that exist within the team dynamic. Through clear communication, proper support, and a solid team structure, your remote teams will have a more sound environment that promotes job satisfaction and productivity.

Before managers can effectively lead their teams, they need to understand who they have on their team and how they like to work and communicate. The Selection report for our new Remote Worker job model details how an individual aligns with the core competencies required for success in a remote role. Competencies like:

• Composure
• Learning Agility
• Information Seeking
• Accountability
• Adaptability
• Time Management

Coaching Remote Workers

The coaching report puts the manager’s job into context. They can see what behaviors each team member has that will likely make the biggest impact on their remote work, with regard to both strengths and areas of development. This allows managers to anticipate challenges and where they can expect natural strength. In this context, managers can start building relationships based on the information they learn and understand the foundation for the development plan they’ll need to lay out for individual and team growth.

The report also provides suggestions for how managers can better guide employees through their development and how to work and communicate with each team member in a way that suits their preferences and natural motivations.

Helping Remote Workers Develop Themselves

Another important aspect of keeping remote workers engaged and happy is by helping them feel in control of their own work and their own development. The Individual Developmental Guide provides employees with an opportunity for self reflection and insights into their own skills so that they can better understand themselves, the way they like to work, and where they might face challenges in their work.

But more than just revealing an individual’s natural strengths and challenges, the Individual Developmental Guide offers suggestions, thought-provoking questions, and conversation starters for developing their skill sets further. It’s not just a report for learning about themselves, it’s a tool for guiding them forward in their career.

Adapting Quickly

You can’t always see a crisis coming. But, the Highlights Report gives managers a quick snapshot so they can see where each teammate has natural strengths, what they might find more challenging, or where they will need additional support in order to build skills in a specific area. It provides a clearer picture of the strengths and opportunities they’re working with, person to person. When you need to move quickly, the highlights report provides an overview of what managers can expect as the transition begins, and helps them anticipate or spot challenges more easily.

This report, instead of waiting to see which problems arise and then reacting accordingly, allows managers to plan ahead, and create an action plan for who’s going to need what kind of support, and when. For a crisis like our current one, that came on suddenly, this kind of preparation can be crucial so as to not lose those critical first days.

For more information about the Caliper Report and how it can transform your teams, reach out to our experts today to get started.