While most of your employees have accepted this to be the new way of life, it is time to help them embrace it. Organizations around the world are now preparing to handle the coronavirus global epidemic remotely.

There are still many employees and managers trying to adapt to this paradigm shift. In such situations, it is necessary to keep the spirits of your team as high as possible in order to maintain productivity.

To get things back on track and how they were in the pre corona world, treat your employees as individuals first and then as team members vital to your organization.

Since this situation may not resolve soon it is essential that your employees feel a connection and belongingness with your organization and not just see their work as a task that has to be completed.

Tips For Managing Team Spirit While Working From Home

In the pre-corona world, employees enjoyed various activities like celebrating festivals or quarter ends. Similar events and celebrations can be arranged beautifully in a work from home scenario.

Here are some ways that HRs can implement to make it work in the post-pandemic world.

Promote Events That Involve Spouses And Family Members

Remember, ‘Bring your kids to work day’? Guess what, now every time mama would enjoy an HR activity, a curious kid or husband would want to know more about it. Hence, why not involve them too? The division between work life and personal life is distinct. However, there is no harm in mixing the two if the company gets better results.

By organizing events every once in a while, that will encourage your team to participate along with their kids, significant others, or family members, you instill a sense of inclusiveness in your team members. This also communicates to your employees that it is essential for them to have family and life outside of work.

Encourage The Team To Take Breaks At Regular Intervals

In the pre-COVID world, most employees looked forward to taking a smoke or coffee break with their work best friend from another department. Why stop them now? It sounds basic, but we all know how easy it can be to get engaged in a task without a break and spend hours at your desk.

Sending employees tiny reminders like “Hey guys, it’s Tea Time :)” on their dashboards or calendars can be a great way to break the monotony. Ensure that your employees leave their workspace during these breaks. Encourage the opportunity to rise, stretch, and refocus. This will build a world of success for your squad.

Dress For Success

You have surely heard of stories about employees wearing a tie and shirt over pajamas for that one video call. Through this pandemic, while formal dressing has surely taken a back seat, some employees have given up dressing altogether.

Encourage your employees to dress up by giving them weekly or occasional dress codes such as casual, traditional, or keeping character days in which they dress up as their favorite characters, or have red, blue, black, etc. color days. This interesting change is sure to lighten them up during this time and increase their efficiency.

Make The Conversations Happen

Most employees had free-flowing conversations with their colleagues in the pre-COVID world. Bad weather? Are kids not well? Overloaded with work? While they continue to work from home, these random conversations that strike a bond amongst the employees seem to be diminishing. Having such conversations brings the team closer and helps them be more open to each other.

Such conversations can be triggered by having remote team building activities like making videos for the ‘pass the pen challenge’ or simply encouraging conversations by having virtual happy hours and work-based versions of ‘name place animal things’.  The best part about such activities is that when stitched together, it gives a feeling of continuity and of being together even when apart.

For an organization, getting the remote teams involved in everyday socializing should be a top priority. This will help build a truly humane connection with remote workers and build trust and openness. The need for such activities will increase all the more as old employees leave and new employees join.

Apart from those mentioned above, there could be more activities ranging from team-building games such as virtual gaming, a challenge of sharing your photo, having movie nights together while sharing the movie on a video call. There are many possibilities.