The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered what many are describing as the world’s largest work-from-home experiment – and we can safely say that it has worked! In just three months, even businesses that were once anti remote working are now planning for a more flexible future. They have seen that employees can work effectively from home and are keen to harness the benefits in terms of reduced office costs and a happier, more engaged workforce. However, facilitating remote working in the short-term is not quite the same as making it part of business as usual. Tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack may have been our work-from-home heroes during lockdown – but employers will need to support employees in other ways if they are to work from home in the longer term.
- The right set-up
It is hard to be productive when you don’t have the right set-up, yet according to research from Bupa, only a third of UK adults have a dedicated workspace at home. Employees report using their sofas, kitchen chairs, beds or even beanbags as makeshift workstations. This is just about manageable in the short-term, but it is far from sustainable.
Having the right technology is just as important. More than a third of UK remote workers surveyed by managed service provider Atlas Cloud claim that their home-working tech needs to be revamped if they are to continue to work effectively.
To enable your employees to be productive away from the office, audit their current set-up to ensure that it is fit for purpose. And if it falls short, consider following the example of Twitter and Basecamp by giving employees a home-office fund to help them create the right work environment – whether that means investing in adequate lighting or a stand-up desk.
- The right infrastructure
Research from software company Citrix Systems highlights the technical issues that have made remote working tough for some. Employees say that their biggest technology challenge has been connectivity due to slow home broadband and Wi-Fi.
Not being able to access all the applications they need to do their job is another bugbear, while some report that their network connection is slow.
If you plan to enable remote working in the longer-term, consider offering workers an allowance so that they can upgrade their home broadband for business use. Also think about adapting your technical support to cater for a more dispersed workforce. This could be an opportunity to move to a self-service model, which would allow employees to access the support they need, regardless of where they are, via a range of channels.
- The right processes
During the Covid-19 pandemic, companies have found that some of the processes that once held true no longer apply in the new world of work. They are either slowing things down or are impossible to complete because they are based on people being together in an office.
Resist the temptation to apply collaboration technologies to old processes in an attempt to adapt them to new ways of working. Instead, take this opportunity to reinvent and reimagine how you do things, and use technology as an enabler. For example, turning a traditional face-to-face brainstorm session into a video call might not be the best way to get people’s creative juices flowing. A more effective approach might be a period of asynchronous brainstorming using a digital whiteboard followed by a video call to refine ideas. Take the time to consider what is going to work best for your business and will support how people will be working in future.
Of course, remote working isn’t just working from home. Once restrictions ease it could mean working from the local coffee shop or from a poolside desk in the Med. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that businesses need to choose between a virtual or an office environment – a hybrid model can work just as well. Whatever the new normal looks like for your business, the key is to ensure that the right workplace policies are in place to support it and that employees know what they are, and that employees have the proper set-up to succeed wherever they are working from.
By Hannah Paterson, Principal Consultant, Step5
About Step5
Step5 is a UK-based digital transformation consultancy. It specialises in delivering complex change programmes and in recovering programmes that are failing to meet their objectives. Please visit www.step5group.com to find out more.
About Hannah Paterson
Hannah’s career has seen her work on ground-breaking public sector projects in the UK, USA and Australia. She has crossed sectors from defence to healthcare with clients including public sector services supplier SSCL, the BBC and the National Health Service.
Prior to joining Step5, Hannah was Project Director for the New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet responsible for the review and consolidation of human services delivery with an annual budget of Aus$7 billion. She joined NSW Department of Premier and Cabinet from Worley Parsons, the global engineering and resources firm, leading the implementation of a global project and programme implementation framework.
Hannah is a Prince2 and MSP practitioner and uses Software Development Lifecycle, AGILE and PMBOK methodologies.