Governments around the world have declared a state of emergency in response to the evolving COVID-19 crisis – these announcements have been followed by orders to temporarily close all non-essential businesses in order to help flatten the curve and decrease the risk of spreading the coronavirus. These decisions have left thousands of businesses in a unique situation – in order to continue operations, they now find themselves hosting an entirely remote workforce.

Remote work has been shown to boost employee morale, offering them the freedom they desire and the chance to finally create a healthier work-life balance – while the situation is far from perfect, it’s providing your business with an ideal time to take advantage of the many benefits of remote work.

If your business is new to remote work, you’re going to have to quickly address a variety of things to ensure that you and your employees are ready to succeed in a brand new work environment. From fostering a new employee culture to adapting tools that allow your team to communicate and collaborate instantly, there are a number of things you can do to ensure that your business is ready for remote work.

**Building employee culture for a remote team
**In order for your team to become successful remote workers, you’ll need to begin to foster a healthy employee culture that matches the new challenges your business will be facing. During these stressful times, your team will look to you as their leader – you need to be able to assure them that everything is going to be okay, despite the new hurdles you face. This is going to take plenty of transparent communication between you and your team.

Business solutions like Slack and Google Hangouts Meet are great ways to host a variety of communications between employees. Use these tools to promote communication as a major part of your employee’s new remote working habits. Whether it’s formal conferences, messaging team members to make sure they’re on track, or just exchanging memes and funny GIFs, communication is going to be critical for success in the uncertain times that lay ahead of us.

Hosting regular conference calls will help to keep everybody on the same page, and give all team members a voice no matter where they’re working from. It’s also recommended that employers and managers begin hosting one-on-one calls to check in with employees, ensuring that they’re doing okay and offering to help wherever possible. Remember to be flexible and willing to take a load off overburdened employees who need a break. Promote interpersonal communication between employees, and don’t be afraid to get creative – hosting music listening sessions, webcam yoga/exercise, or even remote games can provide a major morale boost and help distract from the current situation.

**Tools to ensure remote work success
**You’re going to need more than the right workplace culture to make remote work a success. In order to thrive in this strange new environment, your team is going to require tools that make working from home easy. The most useful tools will be cloud-based solutions that encourage collaboration between team members, and make communication easy, no matter where your team is or what device they’re working from.

Solutions like Zoho One offer your entire team dozens of cloud-based apps that they can work within from anywhere, setting up every department for remote work success. From Zoho CRM and Books to Zoho Projects and Desk, Zoho One acts as your remote team’s unified operating system, allowing employees the freedom to collaborate and communicate seamlessly. Zoho apps can be customized and integrated with other popular workplace solutions by a Zoho Advanced Partner like ion8, giving you extra mileage out of the already stellar lineup of apps and making the transition to remote work seamless for your entire team.

It’s understandable to have worries about how this new remote working situation is going to affect your business – thankfully, there are tools to help ease your mind. Prodoscore is a unique business intelligence solution that allows you to monitor the performance of your sales team without being intrusive. Employers are provided with real-time data about how your team is using G Suite, Google’s productivity suite made up of apps like Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Calendar, Hangouts Meet. Each employee is assigned a unique productivity score, allowing you to assess how employees are adjusting to remote work, whether they’ve adopted new tools, and if certain employees are overburdened. This allows you to reallocate resources to help team members in need, improving outcomes and keeping employees happier and healthier.

With the right approach and the appropriate tools like Zoho One, Prodoscore and G Suite, your team should have no problem with the transition into remote work. To find out more about a Zoho Advanced Partner like ion8 can help your business make the seamless transition to remote work, contact us today.