Remote work: A win-win for employer, employees

Abu Dhabi / Emirates Business

As the world assess the impact of Covid-19 pandemic, few things are becoming increasingly clear. One – in the short run (till we have herd immunity or effective vaccine available for all) we have to learn to live with the virus by maintaining the social distancing and be careful in our movements. Second – some impact will be permanent in nature like the work-from-home for the workers. To manage the restrictions on staff movement, many organisations have experimented with work-from-home for workers for service jobs. The effectiveness of this model is causing the organisations to seriously consider using this model permanently as they are able to save significantly on office and transportation costs for the workers. For workers, they are able to save the time in commuting to office as well as have some flexibility in their work schedule, thereby creating the win-win situation for all.
The key sectors, roles that have benefited most from work from home include the services sector like IT services, HR, finance, accounts, network administration etc. These are the areas which have strong potential to allow the remote working of staff, provided suitable tools are made available along with the requisite training on how to use those tools as well as the precautions to be taken in cyber world.
While there are many benefits in using remote working and work-from-home, there are serious challenges as well. The fundamental challenge here is the “Organisation Culture”. Organisations have been putting strong emphasis on personal interactions especially in roles like HR. At the same time employees don’t always have required discipline to be focused on work and put in the required effort when they don’t have manager keeping an eye on them. Apart from these there are technical challenges like IT savvy workers, inability to effectively collaborate with each other when not in physical proximity, lack of understanding of cyber security, lack of tools etc.
Other biggest challenges is the lack of requisite program management skills to manage the workers when they are not sitting in the office. Managers have been trained since beginning to come to office and manage their team.
While organisations can
address the availability of requisite tools like cloud and computers, smart phones with suitable applications; ultimately it is upon the manager especially in middle management category to work with their teams
remotely and effectively.
Various studies have shown that while in beginning people enjoyed the flexibility provided, they are finding the continuous work from home stressful. It will be up to the managers to show creativity and engagement with teams when not in physical proximity to keep team engaged, motivated and productive. In some cases, the organizations have resorted to intrusive monitoring tools which check and log the key strokes as well as web pages being accessed but in long term this kind of monitoring may be harmful. Managers need to be able to manage with goals and allow the flexibility to team as long as objectives are met.
As stated above, the work-from-home is here to stay even after the pandemic is over, but it will not be 100%. A hybrid model will be required where people can come to office periodically for meetings with their colleagues and managers and work from home rest of the time. People will be happy with this flexibility and organizations will be able to make significant saving on account of office and transportation costs. This will also generate employment opportunities for people in small cities as well as for women who can’t come to office daily and are forced to stay out of the work force. However, all this will require focused effort and investment by organizations in requisite tools as well as in training of the employees and managers so that they can be effective when working remotely.
Government also will have to play role through policy making. Data security will be a critical challenge where governments may have to step in with policy making. Also for operations that require long distance / international communication, there may be the need for government to eliminate restrictions which hinder organizations from making tools available to their staff at home.
In conclusion, we see the world having changed and role of technology becoming more intrusive in our work life. There is no going back to the status-quo. There will also be more opportunities for technology players for development of tools to enable the effective remote working. Governments and organizations have to work together to come up with the requisite formula to make the remote working a success and derive efficiency / productivity benefits from the changed world.