Towards the end of September, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson instructed people to return to working from home as and where possible, sending thousands of people back from their offices to remote working again. Not coming into the workplace every day and working from home can be jarring for many, with the transition to working at home for the next few months proving to be difficult.

With that in mind, businesses will want to do whatever they can to support their employees and make working from home as straightforward and easy as possible. With the right tools and support, working from home can create new opportunities for companies and businesses. Here’s our tips on how you can support your staff while they’re working from home.

Encourage social interaction

There’s a lot of perks to working from home; you avoid the grind of the daily commute, you don’t have to make a packed lunch the night before and can avoid the distractions that come with a busy office environment. Yet working alone has drawbacks — even the most quiet introvert is bound to miss the social interaction that comes with working alongside others.

At this time it’s unrealistic to expect staff to meet up socially outside of work hours, but a weekly video call between staff can make all the difference in making sure that staff get important interactions and feel part of a team.

Keep your office routines

A standard 9 to 5 working routine can sometimes feel like a slog, but having a structure for staff is important, particularly considering how tempting it might be for some to have a lie-in and start the working day later. Before long, staff might start missing deadlines or lose track of their workload and tasks they have to complete.

Maintaining routines with a weekly meeting or check-ins at roughly the same time will let everyone know the schedule without having to enforce it too heavily. It also works the other way too. When people are working from home, some will find it tough to separate work and their personal life and end up working outside of their normal hours and responding to emails late into the evening. Let staff know that it’s OK not to respond outside of their normal working hours.

Get the right tech

Before the rise of high-speed broadband, cloud computing, easy file sharing and other technology, working from home was just out of the realm of possibility for most people. Yet now, working from home for many offices is easy enough now.

A VoIP phone system can help ensure that your team manages to stay connected to each other while working remotely. The right system will be flexible enough for all your communication needs, from a simple phone call to functionality like group calls, virtual meetings and other handy features like hunt groups and virtual assistant.

VoIP phones plug straight into an internet connection anywhere in the world and start working, so staff can take them home and remain connected to each other — and customers alike — easily and quickly.

You can also use a desktop app on your pc or a mobile app on you mobile or a combination of all of them, the choice is yours.

For more information on how our VoIP systems could keep your colleagues communicating, give us a call on 01237 420010 and we’ll answer any questions you may have.