Key pointers for building a work from home (WFH) strategy overnight... #neverstopselling

As I mentioned in my last article, the Covid-19 pandemic is changing the way that durhamlane operates. To protect all our people, not just sales, we have encouraged everyone to work from home for the foreseeable future so they can reduce the amount of social contact they have with people when commuting, and at the office.

Social distancing (not very social if you ask me), the new buzzword and improved hand hygiene are really the only weapons we have against this virus until a vaccine is ready and that is not expected this year. It’s important that all employers create a flexible environment that allows their team to contribute from home so we can all play a part in fighting the virus.

But, like many executives in many other companies this urgent need to create a WFH policy overnight was a surprise. I have been looking around at the experience of other business leaders and advisers to quickly adopt some industry best practice.

Brian Blackader, a partner at McKinsey, recently published a very useful article that points out the four key areas you need to focus on when quickly creating a work-from-home policy:

1. Technology. Are you team using their own laptops or are you supplying the equipment and does everyone have good enough bandwidth at home to work effectively?

2. Management. Building a remote working culture takes time and requires both tools and a different approach to how managers supervise people inside the office. Consider coaching or online tools to help the team adjust.

3. Security. Clearly important if you previously locked down all systems in one place, but now have remote workers all accessing your corporate systems. Is your data transfer encrypted? Do you use 2-factor security to ensure the person logging in is really on your team? Can the remote employee print or download data?

4. Stakeholders. The employees you are asking to work from home are most immediately affected and need to agree, but you might also need to talk to unions (if applicable) or CBI & GOV.UK in our case, and you certainly need to ensure that your customers are OK with the changes.

If I was to add a 5th, it would be Support. There are lots of different kinds of support, but mental health, like physical are really important, which is why we partner with the likes of Mind.

These tips are practical and help executives to focus on how to make home working operate effectively. There are questions around equipment and technology, but work culture is perhaps the most important because the team needs to feel they are still recognised and part of a community - the managers also need to feel they can still supervise people that they cannot see. This is quite a significant change in work culture for a team that has always worked in a single place alongside each other.

I also noticed an article by Jim Farnsworth of customer experience specialist Sykes that featured some interesting data. Jim runs their work at home agent programme and therefore is familiar with arranging for the entire customer service team at some leading brands to be all working from home.

Jim noted that in the US around half of all-American workers are already working some of the time from home - it is already becoming normalised. His article also points to data showing that people working from home are more productive because they have fewer interruptions and reduced stress - because they no longer need to commute to work.

Jim also made one other very important point that is obvious when you think about it, but perhaps has not been considered by managers who prefer to be able to see their team. If you can hire people onto your team from anywhere, then you no longer need to only consider those within commuting distance of your office. You can raise the bar and find niche skills or people with fantastic experience and get them on your team regardless of where they are, especially those who are multilingual. That’s an immediate benefit for any company that can embrace remote working.

At durhamlane we are still in early days, trialing our work from home abilities, but we were able to mobilise swiftly, as we moved to completely cloud based working, when we moved to current HQ, nearly 2 years to the day. All though we have been talking about it for some time, it was the virus that created a need for us to do this, but now I have been reading about some of the opportunities and benefits related to WFH, and it’s working, I think without question, it will form part of short, medium and long term strategy going forward, as will Microsoft TEAMS alongside Zoom, as we look to accelerate our growth once again, when this nightmare is over…stay safe and #neverstopselling.