How Business Owners Can Build Resilient Remote Teams

Do you run a business that’s recently had to go fully or partially-remote due to COVID-19? Want to learn strategies that will increase your team’s resilience and help them stay productive while working from home?

Developing your hardiness and resilience allows you to understand how others react to change, which is essential for communicating with team members during the pandemic.

If you’ve been searching for strategies to help your business respond to this crisis, keep reading to learn how you can build a more resilient team while working remotely:

Determine Your Team’s Resilience Factors

When it comes to working remotely, there are a few factors that predict whether people will have resilience: 

• Confidence in their abilities
• Disciplined work schedules and routines
• Social and family support

As the business owner, you likely have a strong sense of the first two factors.

To better support your team, we suggest checking in with them individually to ask how comfortable they feel with remote work, how they plan to schedule their workdays, and how you and their coworkers can support them with any life or family commitments.

For example, if employees are living with or taking care of elderly family members, consider redistributing workloads and asking others with less on their plates to step in and help out team members who might be overwhelmed.

Show Compassion

As we discussed in our previous post, showing compassion and empathy is one of the best things a leader can do during the pandemic. 

Working from home will likely require new routines, and will test your team’s ability to focus when surrounded by distractions. As the business owner, you can make this easier by showing concern, being available when individual team members need support, and even going as far as to make sure they have the office equipment and supplies they need to do their work from home.

Ready to build a business that’s resilient and can thrive during times of change? Click here to get started.

Have Resilience-Focused Conversations

There’s plenty of research that shows that the most effective way to increase resilience at work is through customized, individual coaching. 

As the business owner, it’s important for you to have individual conversations with each team member, but this can be time-consuming and the power dynamic between yourself and your hires might strain the conversation.

If this is a concern, we recommend assigning team members to “check in” with each other via video chats. Provide them with a guide for what they should discuss, including challenges, successful experiences, and what they’ve learned during the pandemic that they can bring back to the office when things go back to normal.

The last point is especially important: people need to be reminded that things will eventually stabilize in order to envision what lies ahead.

How to Build Resilient Remote Teams

Any crisis is an opportunity to build resilience within your business. By applying the strategies outlined above, and investing in understanding your own hardiness and resilience, you can build a workplace team that bounces back from the pandemic stronger than before.

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