The job of a human resources professional is multi-faceted, and our HR tools have to keep up—especially in a remote working environment. (Image: Shutterstock)
A year after making the transition to remote work as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers around the world are still facing challenges with working from home, whether it's new distractions, feeling disconnected, or having insufficient tools to provide the same level of service or quality of work while at home.
In fact, IDG has found that 70% of employees feel they lack the tools to quickly address complex business issues or change business processes. It's up to companies–and especially HR professionals–to ensure we're aware of the challenges our employees are facing and that we're supporting them emotionally and with the tools and processes they need to succeed at work, whether in the office or at home.
Recommended For You
At Formstack, remote work isn't a new concept; we've been doing it for nearly 10 years. In addition to providing mental health support and tools, which is particularly important right now, here are a few ways we've learned to finetune our processes, technology, and perks to make employees feel engaged, supported, and productive.
Make sure employees have the tools they need for success
There are a plethora of digital tools organizations can implement to make sure employees feel connected and empowered to do their best work while working remotely. However, without an IT team present to help employees adapt to new tools, adopting too many may make them feel overwhelmed. HR teams can ease these concerns by implementing training and ensuring employees have sufficient time and onboarding with any new tools.
This extends to HR technology, too. The job of a human resources professional is multi-faceted, and our HR tools have to keep up—especially in a remote working environment. HR technology can help ensure a smooth process for new employee onboarding, benefits selection, vacation requests, employee reviews, and so much more. And while it is particularly helpful for HR professionals to have the right technology, the wrong technology can negatively impact the employee experience for an entire company. Employees shouldn't have to jump through hoops to fulfill their HR needs.
Prioritize strong communication
It's important to make sure employees continue to feel connected to their teams even when they're apart. At Formstack, we regularly host virtual team-building exercises to make sure employees have a chance to connect outside of their work together. To make sure employees feel appreciated, we have implemented "shoutout" time during our virtual meetings so that employees can call out their co-workers when they've done especially awesome work.
However, building a strong remote team isn't just about team-building, but also communicating. Communication is often the thing that suffers most in a remote environment, which can make employees feel disconnected and unsupported. It's important for leadership to set up communication touchpoints so that employees feel supported, informed, and engaged.
This can be accomplished through collaboration tools like Slack and Asana, but "face-to-face" time is important, too. In order to make sure managers are accessible and they have dedicated times to talk with their teams, we ask managers to set up weekly 1:1s and regular check-ins with their teams. We also use the Donut app on Slack, which randomly connects employees for a virtual chat so that employees can get to know others outside of their own teams.
Measure success
All of these efforts could be for naught if you're not measuring your success. Employee surveys are a great way to get a temperature check to see how employees are doing and how your organization could improve, but make sure you're asking actionable questions. If nothing employees say on the surveys seems to get through, they'll stop communicating.
For timing, it's important to strike a balance – you don't want to end up with survey fatigue, but pushing out new surveys at regular intervals ensures that you're aware of any pain points employees might be experiencing so you can take care of them before they become a problem.
At the end of the day, an HR professional's job is to help people, and that's especially important during challenging and transitional times. By investing in new technologies to support HR and company operations, and implementing new processes to help employees adjust and stay connected, we can make everyone's lives a little bit easier in and outside of the workplace.
Miranda Nicholson is the senior vice president of Human Resources at Formstack, a workplace productivity platform used by over 27,000 organizations worldwide to digitize what matters, automate workflows, and fix processes — all without code. With a decade of experience managing corporate HR activities, Miranda currently leads the acquisition, onboarding, and retention of current and to-be Formstack employees.
Read more:
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
