The New Way of Working relies upon few pillars: one of them is flexibility. If you want to achieve flexibility in your company there are different solutions available, among them the most interesting and controversial is teleworking or remote work.
The community of HR professionals is still divided on this topic. Let’s have a closer look…
Thanks largely to the Internet, teleworking has grown among the non-self-employed. Moreover, as of January 2016, Global Workplace Analytics reported that 50% of the U.S. workforce hold jobs that allow them to work from home at least part time, about 20% of Americans work from home frequently, and a 80 to 90 % of U.S. workers would like to work remotely two to three days a week. Additionally, according to some studies, people who work from home are more productive, healthier, and happier overall. That said, people who work from home face their own unique set of challenges, so there’s definitely some things you should know about before you decide to take your work home with you.
Overall, working from home, at least some of the time, seems to be the ideal setup for most people. So if you’re trying to decide whether telecommuting might work for you, here are a few things you should know about the personality traits of people who work from home:
People who work from home are more likely to love their job;
People who work from home are typically more ambitious;
People who work from home are more likely to work all night if required to meet deadlines;
Full-time remote workers are happier and more productive.
Teleworking is definitely a trend to deal with in the near future, therefore what are the risks for the HR manager who wants to hire remote workers?
Considering the prediction that, by 2020, 40% of the US’s workforce will be contingent workers (freelancers), there’s a high chance that most companies will be employing remote workers in the near future. This isn’t a bad thing; remote workers have shown to be more productive and work longer hours than their office counterparts. However, the challenges associated with remote work aren’t easy to face off; especially if your next remote worker is new to working outside an office. So, what can you do to help them succeed?
Seeing the resistance to remote work and apprehensions of some companies with the reliability of remote workers, it’s about time to dispel these reservations by highlighting the best methods to ensure that your next remote worker succeed in their position and give you top-quality results whilst saving on your in-office costs. The best way to adjust your new employee on-boarding process to accommodate a remote worker is to emphasise your company’s culture. It can be incredibly difficult for your newly-hired to engage with the existing culture when all they have to go on is a list of names in their Slack channel or directory.
You can’t treat a remote worker in the same manner as an office employee and expect to get the same results. Remote work allows for workers to perform their tasks at their most productive time of day, and in the location that helps them focus the most, and so you need to be flexible in this manner. So encourage your new remote hires to work during the most productive time of their day. It may seem odd, but if a person excels at working in the early hours of the morning, accommodate that time frame. You still get the expected number of working hours, but their productivity will take a huge boost, as they are not sitting at their desk with a brain full of mush.
Teleworking, as we have seen, puts a lot of benefits on the table. But for the HR manager, it won’t be easy to integrate the teleworkers with the rest of the office staff and into the company’s culture. Organising big events to make these people get in contact can be quite a difficult task and the desired results are not always secured.
Woobe tackles this issue in an innovative way: the concept is to focus on small group sessions to bring back the human contact that is often lost in this digital age. Woobe will give to HR a proficient tool to organise long-term and specifically designed small-group events over large groups of individuals.