Remote Employees: How to Prepare the Company?

Choosing between returning to the office and working remotely, the company should review both its internal business processes and the emerging economic prospects in their entirety. Galina Shablinskaya, Deputy General Director for Operational Development at BDO Unicon Outsourcing, explains what factors should be considered in order to make the right decision.

DETERMINE THE SCOPE OF OPERATIONS THAT YOUR COMPANY CAN CARRY OUT REMOTELY

First of all, it is worth reviewing in detail the company’s business processes in order to adjust the work of the company’s units to the existing circumstances and to ensure uninterrupted functioning. To this end, you need to clearly understand all tasks assigned to the employees and to develop a strategy to resolve potential issues.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you ready to communicate with your customers online only?

• How will you process your documents?

• What should you do in the event of force majeure?

For instance, our company provides services for outsourcing of business processes: we keep accounting and tax records, HR records, calculate salaries, and our employees work a lot with documents. In the conditions of lockdown and work from home, we were forced to fully stop working with hard copy documents by switching to scans and partially to legally valid electronic document flow. In three months, over 40% of our customers were transferred to the electronic document management, we switched to the EDM with our counterparties, and we intend to continue this trend.

The review of business processes will help to correctly allocate the company resources, if the employees presence in the office is required to carry out the operations in full. In our case, the employees who work with hard copy documents are the first to return to the office after the restrictions are lifted. Determine what functions cannot be performed remotely, what percentage of employees you need to return to the office, and create a safe environment for their work in compliance with the sanitary and epidemiological requirements:

• ensure social distancing,

• arrange for regular disinfection of the premises,

• provide the employees with access to the personal protective equipment, i.e. masks, gloves, sanitizers.

ASSESS THE STAFF WILLINGNESS TO WORK REMOTELY

The declared lockdown forced the companies to urgently review the form of their work, and now it is time to sum up the results of the past months. Assess to what extent the team has developed its new communications:

• do you control the work of your employees,

• is there enough interaction among the workmates,

• are the tasks fulfilled on schedule,

• what difficulties did you and your team have to face?

It is also worth taking into account the opinion of the staff, their wish to return to the office or their willingness to continue working remotely. Over the past months, many employees have got used to the new schedule, but not all people have the opportunities and proper conditions for telecommuting. For them, the continued existence of remote work can reduce efficiency or force them to leave.

The easiest way to check this is to take a poll. We asked our employees:

• Do they want to fully or partially switch to the remote work form after the restrictions are lifted?

• How comfortable is it for them to work from home without losing concentration?

• Do they have all necessary equipment and communication facilities?

By results of the poll, we were able to understand how we are going to work, planned a stage-by-stage lift of the lockdown, reduced the area of leased premises and elaborated rules for the employees presence at their workplaces.

TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE ECONOMIC PROSPECTS AND CHANGES IN THE LABOR MARKET

Today, no one can say for sure what awaits us in the future, when there will be the second wave of the disease, how this will affect a particular company. This is the reason why many companies seek to review and to optimize their expenses. In particular, the transfer of some employees to remote work makes it possible to cut costs by reducing the area of leased office premises.

The situation in the labor market is changing inevitably. If there earlier has been an illusion that it is the market of a job seeker who chooses from a variety of offers, now labor relations will achieve a better balance. The time is coming when both the employee and the employer will be more attentive to each other.

Unfortunately, not all businesses survived the period of lockdown; therefore, many professionals were dismissed. However, one should not assume that today the companies will be able to dictate any conditions to job seekers.

For instance, a highly skilled accountant always has a choice: any company is interested in an experienced and reasonable employee, as no crisis will cancel accounting records. On the other hand, the number of job opportunities for low-skilled, easily replaceable staff is decreasing.

Striving to optimize their expenses to the fullest extent possible, the employers give up further staff growth, reveal overlapping, cut the expenses for staff search and training, seek to reduce the amount of manual labor and to automate processes as much as possible.

We expect an increase in the demand for:

• digital solutions for business,

• services of outsourcing providers that are ready to provide high quality at a reasonable price (this may be cheaper than searching and hiring employees, training and providing the necessary equipment),

• services of recruitment companies with the service portfolio including ready-made digital products for the selection and adaptation of employees.

ENSURE INFORMATION SECURITY

When arranging for the remote work of your employees, it is of the first importance to ensure the compliance with the information security requirements. Provide a series of briefs for your workmates on how to handle sensitive data in order to minimize the risk of their leakage, and revise or develop additional internal regulations for the company. You should definitely take into account:

• regular password change,

• rules for blocking personal computers,

• availability of licensed antivirus software,

• control of access to work folders and documents.

Make sure that the employee’s home environment and equipment meet the information security requirements. You may send your workmates a questionnaire in order to find out in detail the conditions of remote work in each particular case: whether the employee has his / her personal computer / laptop or it is used by several family members, whether the home Internet is stable, etc.

If there are problems with the equipment, you should consider providing your employees with work laptops, additional equipment, e.g. a headset and the second display, corporate mobile communications. 

We switched the entire company to telecommuting a few days after the general lockdown had been declared. It was difficult to predict whether the people most of whom had never worked from home before would be able to fully perform their duties remotely. There were doubts about the equipment, the ability of internal networks to carry the servers load, the conditions for our employees to work in, and there were also organizational issues requiring a quick solution.

But we got through, and that situation showed that the company is ready to respond to external challenges promptly. Now we have to return to the office, and this is also a challenge in a certain way, but we are sure that everything will be all right, because we have carefully worked through many issues, found solutions to potential problems and are ready to respond to changes flexibly.

Source: HR-tv