Work From Home — What You Need To Know
Are you looking at asking your staff to work-from-home (WFH) given the forced social distancing that the COVID-19 virus pandemic has necessitated?
Here are some quick notes to help you manage the huge disruption & transition in culture this may require (I have worked with remote tools in the tech industry for 25+ years and have these are based on my own insights and experiences AND quick survey of literature published in the last week as the WFH is gaining momentum and 6–8 week lockdowns are threatening business continuity everywhere).
1. Does your team have the infrastructure to Work from Home?
Many workers may not have the laptops, monitors, cables, high-speed internet connectivity (wifi routers) at home to quickly connect to office servers, cloud servers and cloud-based collaboration tools. They will need to purchase equipment quickly and this may create a large CapEx pressure on companies.
Action: Companies must assess immediately the readiness of all employees to connect from home. Create an internal tool — google form / typeform to capture this readiness and use the data to plan phases of WFH roll-out.
(Even Google found out that significant number of employees did not have backup equipment to work from home and they had to raid the offices and strip their desks of cables & equipment].
2. Is your company culture setup to facilitate Work from Home?
Many companies have high security / secrecy requirements. All access must be via VPN, encrypted channels and many parts of the infrastructure can ONLY be accessed from company sanitised offices.
WFH will fail in these situations. Firstly, large scale of deployment of VPN across all employees will take time and cost; secondly even with VPN the culture of secrecy / security over access may create road-blocks for accessing day-to-day work from remote, home locations which may not be that secure.
Action: Company management and HR must do an inventory analysis of all systems, assets which are highly secure / secret and come up with guidelines on remote access/ from home access.
[Apple recently asked its staff to WFH. But their famous secrecy culture prevented many employees from accessing basic assets needed to work remotely. Not having a catalog of policies that would need change delayed putting in place new policy and productivity suffered].
3. Is your company using video-conferencing / web-conferencing over audio conferences?
Audio conferences are notorious for low productivity. Many companies don’t even use an audio-conferencing bridge (system) to dial-in to conferences using passcode / meeting-id. They rely on chain of callers with each participant dialling one of more participants. Call drops kill the productivity of these meetings. Avoid such call-chains.
Audio conferences have reported low productivity. Most folks assume they can multi-task while these meetings are on-going. They may put the audio on mute and do other personal or official work and are easily distracted away from the meeting agenda. Meetings can be dominated by one or two participants and others feel ignored/tuned-out.
With video-conferencing and web-conferencing systems maturing to high productive grade and plenty of high-speed internet even on phones (5G), its better to plan video-conference meetings and web-conference meetings when asking employees to WFH.
Action: Company management must quickly finalise the tools they intend to use for video/web conferences. There is a range of choices available (comparison coming soon) and can go from free options for 1:1 and limited use to enterprise level deals for very large deployments.
[Zoom has made its video conferencing tool free for K-12 schools. This is a great step in this hour of need. Using Zoom, one can go from 1:1 meetings to meetings of 10,000+ members and 100s of presenters on their webinar product.]
4. Is your company used to cloud-based collaboration Workflows?
The tech companies created and use a variety of cloud-based tools for collaboration — from storage & file systems to messaging, project & task management, video calls, desktop sharing & white-boarding, employee tracking. Teams collaborating using these tools are highly productive and will benefit the most from WFH.
Companies that adopt WFH across all functions for the very first time will need to train its staff, advisors who can hand-hold them and offer support as their teams discover the power of collaborative tools and build expertise. Since everybody is working remotely, even the trainers will have to be remote-savvy and be patient to help first time adopters take steps with a plethora of tools that will be needed.
Action: Company management should identify the basic platform that are a MUST have for collaborative remote work culture and quickly purchase the same. Fortunately, most of the tools are available as SAAS model and subscription service. They should also hire consultants / experts who can help their staff in the critical learning for WFH.
[Small companies with upto 50 employees may need infra, tools to manage upto 20–25 meetings per day. Large companies will have much more complexity. Very few companies may have ever done an all-hands meeting across all employees (50- 500000) and need help on platforms, processes and best practices for doing this].
