When you’re running a business, it can be hard to even think of managing your household. But if you need to leave the workplace in favor of setting up an office at home, you need to be able to leave some matters in their hands. These are a few of the guidelines that you can follow so that you’ll be able to manage both your house and your business effectively.
Lay the Ground Rules
Some tasks, such as contacting commercial lighting services, can be done by your employees in your workplace. You need to set some guidelines for them to follow. If you already have an employee handbook and operations manual, then you can refresh your workers’ memory of it. If you need to, you can make an update to fit the current situation. In case you do not have one yet, it’s best to take the time to write it all down now. It will make your life easier and semi-automate some operations of your business.
Appoint Trusted People
Now that you have to run the business from home, this is the perfect time for you to hire or promote employees to become managers. They will be the ones who will directly oversee your operations and make sure that it’s running correctly. If you need to contact your employees, they will be your primary choices, and you don’t need to have an extensive list of people to talk to. Just make sure that they are individuals whom you can trust and comfortably work with.
Open Communication Lines
When you’re not visible, it can be easy for your employees to think that you’re not there at all. You should open your lines of communication, such as email and video conferences, to make your presence felt. However, you should make it clear that you’ve already set protocols to minimize time wasted on inquiries that can be answered by your guidelines. Tell them that communication lines are mostly there for updates and evaluation, essential matters that only you can handle, and questions about situations that you don’t have a specified set of actions for.
Focus on Goals
It can be exhausting for you to keep track of everything your employees do, and attempting to do so will be a breach of trust. That is called micromanagement, and that will be detrimental to you and your business in the long run. Instead, you can set goals and regularly evaluate your workers’ performance based on those goals. See if the benchmarks you have set are feasible within the time frame, or if you need to adjust them so that your employees will be able to reach them.
If you want to manage your household while running your business from a distance, you need to set up a system that you and your employees can follow. It has to be such that they can run most of it according to how you want it, and with minimal supervision. But you have to take note that this is based mostly on trust. So building it before and during your physical absence is essential.
