It’s not new news that work as we knew it has changed dramatically over the past few years with more employees working remotely than ever before. While this is a newer phenomenon for many HIM employees, at UASI we’ve been working this way for over 20 years. In order to recruit and retain the best in the field, and cut down on travel hassle for our teams and costs for our clients, we built our remote coding services practice 23 years ago. Our success operating this way led us to quickly adopt remote working for our Revenue Integrity, CDI, Audit and Coding Review and consulting teams as well. This has enabled us to find the best talent no matter which zip code he/she lives in over the years.
Working remotely can be lonely and people can feel isolated, so it’s important to engage your staff regularly and in various ways. Though there are countless articles and blog posts about working remotely successfully, it’s still a struggle for many. Regardless of having 20+ years of experience operating this way, it never hurts to remind ourselves what works, so we wanted to share a few tips.
- Routinely schedule calls with your team members to check in and see how they personally are doing and how the work is going. Make sure to personalize the call and ask if goals are being met and if there are issues preventing their success or milestones to celebrate.
- Send emails consistently that not only check in on people, but also share something fun and/or educational such as:
- Industry hot topics and/or education
- Fun facts for that month or week
- Celebrations such as birthdays, births, graduations, work anniversaries
- Congratulations on obtaining new credentials or a personal milestone
- Make Department meetings fun and educational. After providing an overview of the team performance and updates, ask a few people to share something about themselves and/or have a few team members take turns presenting an educational topic briefly. This enables them to work together on something, work on something different than their day-to-day responsibilities and educate the team at the same time. You can even play online games to get to know each other or just to have fun. Our teams play trivia games, bingo, and even industry-related word searches. It is a simple way to engage people and creates opportunities to bond with one another
So, here’s the challenge for you: If you aren’t doing these 3, put one in place before next week when we post 4 additional tips!