Introduction
The world struck by the COVID pandemic in 2020 has impacted the way employees work drastically. It made the employees who work in the office change their working arrangements and methods of communication to a remote arrangement.
With time, this work arrangement became a new normal for the employers and the staff as it offered a better work-life balance, lower running costs, and higher productivity. We have prepared a list of some remote work survey questions that will likely be asked to the employees who would never see a return to the office. Before that, let us first know why the remote workers are surveyed.
Why should you survey remote workers?
There are plenty of benefits to be gained when working remotely. With the right support, many of its negative aspects can be eliminated. The employees' shortcomings can only be known by conducting a staff survey.
The surveys for the remote workers include the working environment and tools they work with, their ability to build relationships and communicate, making them feel comfortable, and keeping them productive.
The surveys include employee surveys and templates to let the employees learn the future ways of working, whether the back office, remote work, or a hybrid way of working.
What should you aim to measure in a survey for remote teams?
Certain metrics are measured when a survey is conducted for the remote teams, such as:
- Employee Productivity
- Efficiency at Work
- Company ROI
- Client satisfaction
- Employee attitude and behavior
- Credibility towards an assignment
How to get feedback from employees about remote work?
You can get the employee feedback about their expectations about remote work by performing the following measures:
- Holding up the meetings
With more workplaces getting towards remote work, it demands effective one-on-one communication to be held regularly. The HR professionals should meet the individual employee reports to know their performance and how they work in a remote environment.
- Make a schedule
Schedule a time for conducting the feedback sessions. Instead of having a quarterly or yearly review, have regular conversations by meeting the department, teams, or employees to know the team or the individual needs.
- Be honest
HR professionals must give constructive feedback to elevate their employee performance in turn. It is always a good practice to be honest, and direct about what you are trying to communicate. Even with negative feedback, honesty is crucial for an employee’s professional development and business growth.
- Make use of video
There are various video conferencing platforms available that can be used to make communication with the employees in real-time. Use a hosting video site to save your video calls for future references. Make sure that everyone in the conference has the login information, guidelines, and expectations regarding the meeting flow.
- Leave your employee with an action plan
Offer your employees an action plan to be followed to move ahead. As the interactions are limited in a remote working arrangement, and you cannot access your employees directly, an action plan will reduce the number of interactions, and the employees will be able to work effectively.
- Ask questions
Encourage your employees to ask questions and share feedback from time to time. Ask them the task they have performed well, their challenges, and what they do differently. Additional information that employees share helps you understand their challenges with working remotely.
Remote work survey questions: best practices
Before asking the remote work survey questions, you need to follow the following best practices:
1. Be clear with the remote working objectives
Set clear objectives for the remote to let them know their next move. Establish achievable goals by segregating the general objectives into easily measurable units.
Generate the goals from the number of sales, lead conversion rates, company revenue, and average response time. Be sure to define the metrics and communicate them to the team members, making them aware of your ultimate aim.
2. Choose the right tool
Without proper tools, remote work can be difficult. Creating a robust infrastructure to support work and measure it is necessary. Pick the best tools suiting best with your needs, such as a project management platform, a videoconference application, and a collaboration tool. All of these will help you follow the work closely and let you monitor your team’s productivity with highly detailed reports.
3. Focus on the results, not the time that you spent
Instead of focusing on the hours the team is spending on a project, focus on your team’s performance and let them work at their own pace.
Top remote work survey questions
COVID has completely transformed the way employees work and has given rise to the concept of remote working. Asking them the following remote work survey questions will enable them to work more productively for your team.
1. Do you have a suitable workstation to set up to work from your home efficiently?
Every employee is expected to have a system with specific technical specifications: 9th or 10t-gen Intel I5 or I7 processor, RAM of 8GB or above, and 256GB SSD storage to work, and there must not be any time lags in the communication between the team members even though they are working remotely.
2. Do you have the necessary tools and equipment to work effectively from the workspace?
This question checks the available tools or resources the company doesn't have, and they can create those to give to the team member to improve their work performance. Checking the missing resources and tools helps the employees perform their tasks well.
3. Do you understand the work processes to be followed, apps, and security requirements to work effectively from home?
Every company has some work processes, apps, and security requirements to be followed when working from home. Thus, in this arrangement, it is important to train the employees in every company process so they can manage the work independently.
4. Do you feel less, equally, or more productive, or would you like to return to the office sometime in the future?
Asking the team members about their productivity levels while at home compared to the office can demonstrate how well the remote team members feel. After getting the insights, you can provide remote employees with the resources to work productively at home or create a hybrid solution.
5. Do you feel connected to your team members when working remotely?
As every project is teamwork, employees need to stay connected with the team members in a remote arrangement, which is more feasible in an office arrangement while a bit challenging to manage in a work-from-home environment.
6. Do you contact your senior managers regularly?
Regular communication with the senior managers lets the employees know how far they have achieved their milestones and how more productive they can get.
7. How often should the leads connect with you to know how you handle the business challenges: Daily/Weekly or a few times a week?
As the employees always have some challenges to deal with, they expect the leads to keep track of their task completion regularly so that they know where they stand.
8. What are your suggestions for improving your communication with your manager?
Ask the team members how the company can improve communication with them. This lets them share their challenges in communicating messages to the team efficiently. Efficient communication allows everyone in the team to understand the goals they're responsible for.
9. Do you enjoy working remotely?
This question serves as the foundation for the rest of the questions about working from home. This allows the individuals to share their achievements and challenges so that you can provide them with the needful solutions.
10. Is it possible to maintain a healthy work/life balance when working remotely?
Asking this allows you to determine if any of your team members need some help from you. Advise them about implementing their routines during and after work making them feel productive while working.
The future of work is remote, so keep your distributed staff as engaged as possible
COVID-19 has made us all understand that remote work will be the future to keep the maximum staff engagement. An excellent remote work culture can be established by creating healthy opportunities with the right tools, communication, and planning. Asking your employees the remote work survey questions mentioned above will result in better productivity and a happier and more engaged workforce.
Make the most of the employee engagement surveys and performance reviews with mesh.ai by using their solutions to make your company a place where everyone loves to work!
