Is remote working the new normal?
COVID19 has taken a number of businesses by surprise. Many businesses do not actively encourage remote working and the practice is generally frowned upon. Or grudgingly accepted. Despite technical advances, there’s a pariah about remote working - people don’t work; they shirk work, etc etc. This is more a mindset issue - a legacy of industrialisation era, where ‘work’ meant being in one place (office) during a select time (usually 9 am - 5 pm) and do your tasks. As more tasks are transforming as ‘Knowledge activity’, there is virtually no need for people to congregate at a place to deliver the outcomes.
This is not a new insight; we always knew about this, read about it, but often failed to act on it. So far, remote working was limited to couple of days in a week. Now, when the need arises for majority (if not all) of employees to work remotely, some businesses have been caught wanting. Managers, who hitherto frowned upon remote working have realised that the work is still getting done at the same pace by the same employees (who supposedly watched Netflix while working remotely!!). This calls for a fundamental rethink of current business practices.
Long, long time ago, AT&T decided to sell their offices and equip their employees with a laptop and phone and made them mobile. That was the time when there were hardly any collaboration tools. Now, an organisation has a wide variety of collaboration tools available with them. And most often, they are already in their tech stack. It’s time we use them to our advantage.
If you work in London, I am sure you are aware of the daily commute when millions of people descend every morning in the square mile. It’s just not London; this is the story for every major business location. Businesses, in their turn, spend millions to make their workplace employee friendly and compliant to the local health and safety regulations. It’s time when they need to rethink. How can you support (even encourage) remote working? How, in the remote working environment, you can effectively manage performances and, simultaneously, keep the employees’ morale alive? And how do you ensure that the employees that need to come to work do not feel ‘penalised’?
COVID 19 is a wake up call for majority of the businesses who still continue to work on legacy models. I am not using the phrase ‘legacy model’ lightly. To me if your business has manual processes, use a lot of EUC tools (e.g., spreadsheets on individuals laptops, Access databases to name a few) and rely on geo-spatial access controls on data, you are probably in a legacy model. If your managers, want to ’see’ people working, or use activity monitoring tools to manage performance, you operate in the legacy model. There are enough tools available to collaborate remotely while still keep your data secure. And compared to the costs of facilities management and premises management that you spend annually, it is just a fraction. You need to do the maths.
The above is just some initial thoughts that I had on the topic. I will continue to develop this in the near future. I will welcome any thought on this.
