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Before COVID-19, many companies offered flexible working arrangements but employees usually needed a reason to take it up. Only a few organisations were agile enough to allow employees to work from home on a regular basis. 

Now, with social distancing restrictions beginning to ease, many employees are asking the big question: Can I still work from home once this is all over? 

Just like customers, employee expectations are changing as cloud technology empowers people to work with more flexibility and have access to more information now than ever before. 

If your organisation is considering making working from home a permanent option, here’s a few tips on how you can enhance the employee experience and keep them engaged no matter where they are. 

 

1. Goodbye internal emails. Hello Slack and Chatter


If your organisation hasn’t already embraced work-based social networking tools, now is the time. Tools such as Slack and Chatter make it easier for people to collaborate as users can swap messages, share files and create personalised newsfeeds as they would on Facebook or Twitter. This makes it easier for employees to keep track of information and reduce clutter in their inboxes. Plus, there’s little need for user training since the platforms are intuitive and familiar.

 

2. Streamline sharing of internal documents 


After working remotely, employees will expect access to information anytime, anywhere and on any device to continue. Before business returns to ‘normal’, look at how your company plans to share work-related documents on a long-term basis. This could involve reviewing your company’s intranet to see how it can streamline onboarding and administration processes to empower employees to get relevant information quickly from anywhere. This way, employees can check the policy for parental leave from their mobile devices, without having to email HR, for example.

 

3. Help your employees prepare for the future of work
 

Employees know that technology is evolving at a rapid pace and jobs are changing with it. In order to keep up, they will have to continually learn new skills and employers will need to find new ways of teaching them.

Gamification is a great way to inspire your employees to build skills for the future. With myTrailhead – Salesforce’s continuous learning platform – companies can create a customised environment with their own content and branding to help employees with everything from onboarding to company-specific enablement skills and career progression.
 


Here’s how to get started with myTrailhead:

  • Pave the way with Trailmaker: This guided setup tool allows for easy creation of private learning content for employees or customisation of pre-curated public Trailhead materials.

  • Check out Trailhead Profiles: Here, you’ll find a complete view of an employee’s skills and expertise, which showcases the Trailhead badges earned, points accumulated and skills learned. Rewards and ranks gamify learning and career advancement. When employees look to switch roles or start a new project within a company, managers will have a complete view of their skill sets to aid internal recruitment.

  • Build and share learning trails with Trailmix: Employees can create and share their own learning paths called Trailmixes. These can include material from your favourite trails, modules, projects, and superbadges.

  • Motivate employees with Trail Tracker: This free AppExchange app brought to you by Salesforce Labs lets employees see their own achievements and check how they stack up against their peers via gamified leaderboards. Managers can also use the app to assign and track personalised learning across the organisation.

  • Test employees using Trail Checker: This allows companies to build interactive challenges designed to assess skills – including stand-and-deliver, quizzes and hands-on challenges.

Discover more about how you can enhance the employee experience with myTrailhead.

 

Remote working is now the norm in many businesses. To keep employees engaged no matter where they are, employees will need the right communication and learning tools. 

Find out more about how cloud-powered technology can transform the employee experience at speed and scale by downloading this e-book.

 

This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of the Salesforce blog.