Are you prepared to work remotely?

With more and more employees working from home globally, the key question from an organisation’s perspective is whether working from home will lead to a greater rollout of this mode of working in the future, or whether it will remain an emergency measure.

Companies like Twitter have made working from home a permanent arrangement for employees whose job scope and situation enable them to do so. The decision, which was announced by Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey in May, is a bid to push the company towards a decentralised and distributed workforce “capable of working from anywhere”.

Following Twitter’s announcement, tech giants including Facebook and Google have also highlighted their own plans for employees to work from home, albeit for a specific timeframe.

Facebook employees were encouraged to work from home for the whole of 2020, even though offices reopened in July. Google also told employees to be prepared to work from home for the rest of the year, with the exception of essential staff who returned to work in June.

Research suggests that companies that let their workers decide where and when to do their jobs – whether in another city or in the middle of the night – see increased employee productivity, reduced turnover and lower organisational costs.

According to a survey by The Australian Financial Review¹ which covered 5,000 employees across Europe and the Asia Pacific, one in three workers experienced less stress due to the switch to remote working. Respondents cited reduced commute time as the greatest benefit of working from home, with half of them saying that they were using this time to instead be more productive.

In Singapore, research by Qualtrics² revealed that one in three employees experienced heightened productivity whilst working from home. A third or 35% of the 350 respondents surveyed also reported improvements in their mental health and feeling less stressed with the remote working arrangements.

The remote working model benefits businesses as well. According to a global workplace study³ by multinational workspace provider IWG, 85% of businesses that support flexible work arrangements for staff saw an overall increase in business productivity. Similar research by Owl Labs found that companies that allowed remote work have 25% lower⁴ employee turnover than those that did not. A Gallup report⁵ on work flexibility also estimated that each telecommuter saved the business an average of US$10,000 a year on commercial real estate expenses.

However, many of the benefits of remote working are contingent on organisations equipping staff with the right skills and tools for them to remain productive while working from home.

Today, provisioning the tools needed for remote working is relatively easy with the advent of cloud computing. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud-based tools such as Zoom, Skype, Google Meet and BizConference enabled the global workforce to conduct virtual meetings. This helped businesses to mitigate one of the greatest challenges of remote working – the inability to meet up face-to-face for discussions.

Other useful tools include collaborative apps like Slack, Podio and Google Docs which allow teams to communicate, share files and manage tasks to facilitate their workflows.

Some tools like Slack also enable the messages to be sorted by channels, and employees who have queries on a certain topic can search these channels for answers. They can also share files through a simple click-and-drag into the app or by sending a link, and all it takes is a couple of clicks to review the files and respond to messages.

Employees working from home will also need to upload and share work-related documents with one another. With cloud-based file-sharing platforms such as Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox, files can be accessed from anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection. These platforms also allow users to see who interacts with a file, post comments, assign an action term and work with others on a document.

Research conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity on 1,100 companies found that such collaborative work was five times more likely to result in higher performance, with the use of collaboration tools as a contributing factor to this productivity boost⁶. Organisations using such tools recorded a 49% reduction in email volumes, 25% drop in the number of meetings and an overall productivity growth of 32%.

From a project management perspective, there are also tools available to manage the work done by staff, organise work files, delegate tasks among employees and work jointly on projects to achieve the best possible results. Examples include Asana, Trello and Podio.

Having a good grasp of these platforms and tools will become more and more important as remote working arrangements become a permanent fixture for some organisations, at least for part of their workforce.

However, the rapid switch to remote work in response to COVID-19 meant that many employees were not properly trained to use these digital tools. This gap will have to be addressed as organisations prepare themselves for the new normal.

Some organisations use the tools to teach the tools. For example, online training sessions for staff are conducted using video conference tools like Zoom, and file sharing platforms are used to disseminate relevant lessons materials.

Others create video tutorials that provide detailed, step-by-step explanations on how to use the recommended digital platforms or tools for their work, or to direct staff to relevant courses on online learning platforms such as Coursera, Skillshare and Udemy. These platforms offer a plethora of tutorials on the use of productivity tools that are relevant to various roles and responsibilities.

For more structured training, tools like learning management systems can be used to build interactive and individualised training courses and track employee attendance and progress. An example is ProProfs Training Maker, a cloud-based learning management application that addresses the lack of proper digital training for remote workers through a wide range of training resources including a self-service knowledge base, quizzes and surveys.

Besides training employees to be digitally proficient, these platforms and tools can also be used to equip employees with relevant soft skills that will enable them to work more effectively from home. These include communication skills; good time management to ensure that they are able to meet deadlines while working from home; and problem-solving skills especially in a remote working context where help may not be as readily available as it is in the office.

For example, the learning management system can be used to share time management tips and anecdotes as well as simulations modelled after real-life interactions with colleagues, managers and customers to help develop problem-solving skills.

As organisations rebuild in the wake of COVID-19, remote working is expected to become part of the new reality. Employees will need to be equipped not only with the right digital tools and the ability to use them, but also the soft skills like communication, time management and problem-solving that will help them adapt to and thrive in the new normal.

Prepare your workforce for the new normal. Speak to us today.

1 Australian Financial Review, It's more productive to work from home, April 2020.

2 HRM Asia, A third of Singaporeans feel more productive working from home, April 2020.

3 The IWG global workspace survey, March 2019

4 OWLLabs, State of remote work 2017.

5 Gallup, State of the American workplace.

6 Raconteur, How collaboration powers productivity, December 15 2017.