3 Reasons Recruiters should choose to work from home!
Last week we experienced weather conditions in the UK that has hugely affected businesses up and down the country as disruptions to train and bus services prevented many of us from travelling to and from work. In addition to this, many schools closed and so we had the added burden of having to entertain our children at home with what I'd like to call 'radical home-schooling', which was nothing more than my 5-year old sitting on my lap and intently listening in on conversations with my team, desperately trying to make sense of what 'daddy' actually does.
The reality is, for us here at Westhouse & Gardiner it was business as usual because our team not only has the flexibility to work from home, they have that choice. Working from home shouldn't be a last minute resort as a result of poor weather conditions, nor should it be a permission-granted 'benefit'. In today's digital economy, Recruitment businesses should not only have the ability to enable working from home, they should have the responsibility to allow Recruiters the choice to work in an environment that fits around individual lifestyles, whether in an office, home or on a beach somewhere in Thailand..
Here are 3 Reasons working from home should be a choice;
- Become autonomous and self-direct your value.
Autonomy happens to be one of our core principles at Westhouse & Gardiner and as a business owner, it is my responsibility and duty to make sure our teams have the training, education, systems, tools and infrastructure that will enable them to be successful working from home. If I analyse both Annabel (my business partner) and my own journey in recruitment, we've been most successful where independence, self-governing and freedom are synonymous with the environment we're surrounded by. I would highly urge you to watch a TEDTalk by Dan Pink on the subject of motivation, where he describes autonomy to be the "urge to self-direct our own lives". He goes on to explain that the idea or invention of 'management' works well if you are looking to achieve compliance, but if you want to achieve employee engagement, self-direction works much better. I'm not trying to dismiss the need for compliance, but in today's highly complex world and in particularly the challenges we face at Westhouse & Gardiner in supporting our clients' growth through helping them acquire the very best talent in the market, we need our team to be motivated and fully engaged through having autonomy over their time, tasks and perhaps most importantly their 'technique'. Whilst you cannot physically force or demand autonomy from your team, you can take steps towards encouraging autonomy within your culture through enabling and trusting your team's value and performance contributions (see end of blog post for a list of tools/systems).
2. Master your "craft" when and how you want..
Steve Jobs infamously said that "it doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do". Mastery of any task however simple or complex is measured by the results or progress that the task has allowed you to achieve. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the single biggest motivator for any employee is the recognition that progress is being made doing meaningful work.
How does all of this relate to working from home? Allow me to share a recent example to illustrate my point. One of our team members were given the task to create an eBook and whilst we gave her the content, she had to design the look and feel of the eBook along with orchestrating the layout, pick the correct fonts, pictures and illustrations. Through working independently and remotely in an environment and time that suited her, she was 'forced' to use her own initiative in solving problems and finding appropriate solutions. In an office environment, she would be leaning on me or my business partner for guidance, assurance and constant feedback and therefore rely on 'being managed' instead of learning or educating herself through self-direction. She researched numerous eBook templates and through her own frustrations of lack of quality designs, decided to teach herself how to use Adobe Design to create her own template from scratch. Whilst the first, second or even third draft was far from perfect, every draft she produced, significant progress and improvements were made, increasing her knowledge and skill and hence edged ever closer towards "mastering" her design. If employees are motivated by progress and progress is made once you've educated and taught yourself how to achieve results, then the mastery process is best endured independently through self-direction and away from "management". Needless to say, when it comes to eBook and content design, I now take guidance and direction from my colleague as she has now achieved an element of "mastery" around this topic.
3. Reconnect with what's important in life…
Majority of business owners and managers will shoot me for saying this, but the fact is there is more to life than just work and so without sounding too philosophical, it is important to 'reconnect' with the important things in life, such as family or health. Take action and do things that perhaps you're normally unable to do due to being office-based. Take your children to school, pick them up, go to the gym at 3pm in the afternoon or go visit a family relative you've not seen for a while? Personally, working from home has allowed me enormously to do much needed soul searching and has enabled me to focus my thinking and not be distracted. Majority of my ideas and creative thinking have come from spending time with myself and taking a step back to reflect. It's so important and easier to spend time and be comfortable with yourself in an environment of your choice.
A study outlined in the Human Factors of and Ergonomics in Manufacturing suggests that a poor office environment leads to less creativity and can act as a catalyst for the necessity of employee management. Factors that improve creativity such as lighting, plants, colour and furniture are more individualised at home than in an office environment and so it could be suggested that creativity will improve if recruiters work from home. In conclusion, working from home should be a key priority for most recruitment businesses at least in so much as allowing recruiter mobility to be seamlessly achieved with little to no negative impact to the business, culture or performance.
Here are some of the tools and systems we've implemented to allow team members to be engaged remotely:
- Cloud-based CRM (we use Bullhorn) - remote access to candidates/client information from anywhere and on any device.
- Mobile VoiP solution (we use 3CX/Dial123) - remote team conference calls; international calls; remote switchboard; webinars and screen-sharing capability.
- Google Apps for Business - remote access to documents; files; spreadsheets; reports; presentations and training from any device.
- Trello - Task & Project Management