7 Ways to Protect the Physical and Mental Health of Your Remote Team

While remote working isn’t a bad work model, it has its merits and demerits. One of the most significant disadvantages is how it affects the mental and physical well-being of remote workers. Staying at home all day, being cut off from the rest of the world can adversely affect human health, especially if it happens over time. In the same way, staying in one (sitting) position for too long also affects physical and even mental health negatively.

So, remote team managers have their work cut out to ensure that they protect their remote teams’ physical and mental health. Here are seven ways to achieve this goal:

1. Communicate regularly

You’re dealing with people who, apart from being shut in their homes because of the pandemic, have had to lock themselves away from others to avoid distractions and maintain a high productivity level. This will tell on their mental health. So, it would be best if you bridged the communication gap for them. Reach them regularly through online chat, set up virtual meetings daily, etc., and make sure that they don’t feel alone.

Sometimes it’s even a great idea to pair employees from the different departments together to help them get to know each other. Spending more time together during or after work will help employees find mutual hobbies, travels or other things in common. This will give them more space for active social life and enable them to get to know more of their colleagues and the culture of the company.

2. Set up exercise challenges for your team

Sitting for too long in one spot can cause a myriad of health problems. Setting up an exercise challenge for your remote team is one way to show that you care about their physical health.

Try to organize team meetings where all you do is physical exercises to help raise your team’s energy levels.

We all know that physical exercise is extremely important, especially when you spend a great deal of your time at work sitting at a desk with reduced movement. At first glance, there’s nothing so wrong with this (one might even have a really comfortable chair and a screen angled just right!), but after a while people will start to feel the effects of reduced movement: frustration, fatigue or even burnout.

3. Change your meeting habit

Team meetings are essential. Even though Zoom meetings play a significant role, they shouldn’t be the only kind of meeting you hold. For the sake of their physical health, convert some of those video call meetings (where they are expected to sit at a fixed point) to phone call meetings. Then, encourage your team members to go for a walk during the phone call. This will give the feeling of fresh change and elicit more emotions in your calls.

4. Create avenues for team engagement

Team engagement allows members of your team to get to know each other better while working remotely. This will create more synergy between your team members. More importantly, it will ensure that they communicate better among themselves, be friends, and feel less lonely and cut off from the world.

Create an exciting discussion for the team and just let them interact.

It’s good for their mental health!

5. Give more room for flexibility

Being at home means having to juggle different responsibilities at the same time. Home cleaning, looking after the kids, and other family commitments might be hard when you’re combining it with remote work, especially with a fixed schedule. So, you must give your team members more room for flexibility. This will allow them enough time for other things without getting worn out, like spending time with their loved ones or tending to their gardens.

6. Provide more employee support

Everyone on your remote team has to feel that they have your support. There are other times that employees don’t want to talk to their team members or direct manager. In this case, you have to let them know that HR is there to assist them with their personal and professional problems from the work perspective. Because when they have mental or physical problems it is very important to give them safe space, where the employees can take their time, whatever they need at this moment.

7. Encourage and teach work-life balance

You must encourage a work-life balance among your co-workers. More importantly, teach those who are struggling to cope how to balance their family and work at home more efficiently. If you ensure they have all the resources and support they need, you can be sure that in the future they’ll do their best to reach harmony and a high quality of life (and work!).

Some remote workers find it hard to balance their work from home with normal home activities.

Conclusion

Remote working isn’t easy. For all its advantages, it also comes with telling effects on people’s mental and physical health. As a manager, you must be able to engage and help your remote team with their health.

​​About the author

Tiffany Harper is a training guru who’s been working in the corporate sector as a technology expert for several years now. She is a management graduate and loves to share her experience through blogs and expert articles. For her love of writing, she provided online consultations to essay help while working with the best cv writing service uk at uk.superiorpapers.com. Please do not hesitate to contact her on LinkedIn.