As part of the COVID-19 pandemic and the urgent introduction of quarantine measures, each manager faced several problems and questions on transferring the business to telework. How to stay afloat? How to configure the team remotely? Based on my own practice, I believe that transferring a company to the remote work is not just a forced temporary action, but a real trend. Now let’s make out, why is it so.
Many managers have already transferred part of their staff to remote work. Who can be transferred, you may ask? Sales and customer service department, legal department, accounting. Moreover, the practice of remote work in these areas has been mastered a long time ago, and you can find hundreds and thousands of recommendations for transferring employees to the remote work on the Internet. Work from home can be set up in just a few days, even without attending the office. This format saves money on renting office premises, doesn’t limit the head in choosing employees, allowing you to hire specialists from other cities, countries, and even continents and optimize wages easily.
Moreover, even your staff won’t mind such a format of work. Working from home, employees don’t spend time and money on trips, may wake up later, and in total save about 2 hours of personal time for communication with relatives, reading, education, hobbies or leisure.
So what do you get on the way out? First, the increased productivity of the staff. Office work often scatters your employees. In the office, sometimes only an appearance of hard work is being created: the employee is in his place, which means that he works. In remote mode, there are only 2 options: the task is either completed or not. Of course, I am against total control, but there are programs to track the number of hours an employee spends in the workplace. I installed that on my employees’ computers, and sometimes, I can check how things are going on in the team while teleworking. As they say – trust, but check!
This forced quarantine showed that it is possible and necessary to transfer offices to remote work at least partially. As I said, it can be done in a couple of days.
Do you think your employees will be eager to come back to the office after the remote work? I think no.