More than 70% of companies do not have adequate remote working policies – even though it’s a multi-billion dollar issue.
Just a few months ago, the debate was whether you could work from home on some days. Now the debate is whether you should work from the office on some days or at all.
This monumental shift has happened so rapidly that businesses have yet to really deal with the ramifications and opportunities.
DYDX, a digital transformation consultancy, conducted a study with over 250 respondents to evaluate how well teams were performing with regards to their work from home strategies and policies.
The results showed that while employees felt they were coping and engagement was equal to or better than the office (76%) , more than 67% felt that their companies did not have adequate policies to manage remote working, even though 73% found working at home more productive than at the office.
More than 40% of respondents said they had more work than at the office, and over 55% said they felt overwhelmed by the volume of calls, emails and other communication.
According to Nevo Hadas, partner at DYDX, setting a remote working policy is not an IT task.
“It is a strategic task that is a combination of HR and executive leadership. Its purpose is to enable the company to benefit from the big changes occurring in society while enhancing staff engagement, productivity and retention.”
The remote working policy will become a cornerstone digital transformation document for the company. It will impact almost every aspect of work, just like the physical office did, and in many ways define the future of the company’s culture, employee base and customer base.
Some questions to consider when forming a remote working policy are:
- What percentage of your workforce are able to be remote, how do you reduce office space to meet that?
- What limitations do your employees face at home and do you assist them to overcome that (for instance, with a home office allowance) or provide offices just for them?
- How do you coordinate a work from home company, what tools and more importantly, standards for those tools do you use to align communication and tasking?
- How do you move your employment contracts away from time based (9-5) to output based (agree on tasks to be completed within a timeframe) effectively and maintain team communication?
- How do you keep employee engagement and culture strong, while not leading to burn out as employees stay connected at their desks for too many hours?
- Do you change your recruitment policy to hire from other countries/locations or do you keep your employee base closer to a HQ?
- Do you need physical offices to expand globally?
“Remote policies aren’t about whether you use Zoom or Microsoft Teams for meetings, but core strategic issues,” says Hadas.
Done well, it can boost companies bottom lines dramatically, done badly, it can make them uncompetitive.
“As the dust settles post lockdown, executives will need to focus their vision on thinking through how the future of work impacts their business’s evolution into the future,” Hadas concludes.