To Work or Not To Work From Home, that is the question.

The most famous effect of the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of the equation: business continuity + physical lock down = Work from Home.

Supported by a vast ecosystem of digital platforms and tools, we rediscovered the term "remote working" or "work from home". Many of us have already had a similar experience but it was never a norm (standard).

Being a norm means that organizations must go back to square one, observe the new norm and define their shape around it. Think of it as a new regulation a new VAT law in a TAX Free country: all industries will go back and check the impact of such regulation on every department and on every cost unit and on every policy in order to better adapt and remain compliant and so competitive in the market. The same applies here. So for the sake of the discussion let us put our thinking hats on and check the net income of the Work From Home, would it be a profit or loss making.

Keeping the points to a minimum and the discussion strictly stripped for financial quantification. Working from home for many organizations equals reducing the fixed costs related to office space and corresponding "services and bills". Yet this is not all, Work from Home can as well mean remote working and remote working would imply a possible and justified review of benefits and salary scales benefiting the employer but as well the employee as they would be working in their location of choice with the freedom to keep moving.

If the benefits are clear what would be the costs of such an environment?

1. IT infrastructure: not surprised if there s a "DUH" in your mind while reading the first point, so not to detail it more (Security, VPN, Digital Platforms, Updated licenses, migration to cloud, updated servers hub, increase in support resources, clear ticketing system, personal HW service contracts, etc..), it was observed that the related cost has increased in 2020 by a factor between 20 to 40% depending on the organization size and business.
2. Mercenaries Cost More - Vanished Team Spirit: this is one of the major impacts that we are witnessing. Let me take a slight break over here to check with you on a fact: How engaging is your virtual meetings? Do you argue? Everyone freely shares their input? Do you usually reach to an unpredicted conclusion or the one set by the team leader in advance? - Based on your answers it would be very clear if you are leading a group of silos or a proper team. In case of the first scenario, Work From Home will only increase the gap. The team spirit is at risk, in case it existed, and your resources (most or least valuable) are working from their ecosystem, detached from you, with strictly a dry professional connection based on tasks and salary in return. Your army just turned into a group of mercenaries. The loyalty is not there and they will turn to the highest bidder as soon as they ll be offered. With that let us add the cost of employee turnover into the equation: losing a resource, finding a replacement, bridging the gap until the new resource is fully enabled and digesting the cost of mistakes and drop of productivity during this period (if you considered one resource, multiply this by 10).
3. You, Yourself and Irene - The only advice will come from you: One of the benefits of the office environment is the ability to engage with other colleagues from different backgrounds and units. Well not exactly for the purpose of taking a break, but for the purpose of gaining an insight or a different perspective into your business and next decisions inline. Running our ideas & decisions by our colleagues is something that we often do, the problem is that we have never measured the benefits of such a small activity. To be able to understand it and quantify it, consider a leader with their board of trustees or consultants. These personas are there for guidance and mostly to mitigate the risk of any bad decision. Your colleagues are your consultant and how your marketing campaign would run, the amount of profit you would make on a tender, which tool to select for your team or how to reduce cost in your unit are all decisions that could be enhanced if you haven't missed these 15 minutes unscheduled breaks. The direct relation to the company's fund and the hidden status of this spending drain makes this point highly critical.
4. Can you keep a secret? it s actually funny how companies are trying to leverage their information security and introducing policies to define the confidentiality of information and how it should be treated. While cybersecurity is a major risk to consider, this is not where your info-leakage would come from. In order to become an Information Professional, the first thing you learn is to map the information and knowledge regardless of its medium (human memory, USB, hard drive, paper, screen, etc..). Consider your GM having a conference call, their neighbor joined the meeting. Consider one of your teammates wanted to vent out or discuss a new market launch, this will happen with their partner, friend or .., you see where this is going? Needless to mention the value of the cost impact from having information and knowledge flying around, yet before adding this to the equation, kindly multiply it with any exponential factor of your choice. Considering employees working from coffee shops or hubs and having their screens open and as well accessing public networks, well that s just music to the ears of hackers and intelligence agents.
5. Hope you are doing well! Higher Premium: Work from Home has been underlined by chaotic hours, access to resources any time and anywhere added to the stress of the period and as well an unequipped home environment. This recipe on top has yielded to an unhealthy work force. Now this might not ring a bell until the insurance renewal to your team is due and you are faced with the insurance broker raising their premium or in some rare cases rejecting the renewal altogether. In both cases, you have to pay more. Whether following the market benchmark of 8 to 10% increase in premium or other estimated rate, let us add that as well to the cost equation.
6. What would it cost to get your attention? Every single presenter main worry is the attention of their audience. Are they browsing social media? Taking the call while completing an errand? A well governed office environment eliminates a huge risk of distraction keeping your employees with only one channel, the mobile phone. We all have something important to mention and the message needs to be clearly digested in order to translate into action points. Yes, we could engage by after call surveys or questions or additional communication but this equals time which is cost. From the other side the cost of delivering messages to an audience with low attention remains the highest risk to be added as well to the equation.

In case you are considering of expanding on more points you might be interested in estimating the cost of wasted efforts, miss-management due to gap in communication and intimacy with your team, ungoverned workforce, unaddressed L&Ds and much much more.

Listing pain points? No, listing opportunities and market gaps. A new wave of market needs has surfaced. The first thing to do is learn from your own situation. Map your cost clearly, translate it into a business case, invest into bridging the gap, discover what you can provide as services and products as an answer to the new norm, become a strong competitor in this new market and most importantly observe and experiment technologies that might address many of these points.

Now that the savings and cost implication of Working from Home are some how clear, it is easier to conduct a business impact analysis and decide whether to Work from Home, Hybrid or get vaccinated and back to office!

May you Have a happy and Healthy decision making exercise!