How Have Businesses Coped with Remote Working?

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Effective Communication with Virtual Teams (23-slide PowerPoint presentation). The number of people working remotely has been increasing progressively across the globe. An employee benefits report narrates that around 60% companies in the US offer telecommuting opportunities. According to Upwork, freelancers and contractors have increased by 81% from 2014 to 2017. [read more]

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The novel coronavirus has impacted our personal and professional lives in profound ways – and just about everyone in the world has been effected. Among the biggest challenges for businesses is the need to keep everyone apart from one another. On March 23^rd, Boris Johnson announced the lockdown with the words ‘you must stay at home’, forcing businesses across the country to allow their employees to work from home.

The government’s position has now relaxed to ‘work from home if you can’, and many cabinet ministers are allegedly agitating for further loosening. But given that so many businesses have already made the switch to allow their employees to do this, not a great deal has changed. In fact, some of the results of this vast and unprecedented experiment in remote working might actually be positive – and therefore likely to continue even after the lockdown has lifted.

So exactly what steps have businesses taken to aid the transition to remote working?

Video Conferencing

Services like Zoom and Microsoft Teams have, over the past few months, gotten sudden mainstream traction. While there’s a place for phone calls, there’s no real substitute for a sit-down meeting for everyone to get their points of view across. For many businesses, Microsoft’s Teams is the preferred option for video conferencing, as it is a part of the company’s ‘Office’ family of programs, and thus can be integrated more easily into existing workflows. While there have been some concerns expressed about the security of some of these platforms, they have filled a crucial gap, and have contributed enormously to the continued productivity of businesses across the world.

Bonding

Working together doesn’t just mean sharing documents and participating in conference calls. There’s also an element of social interaction that helps any team to effectively cohere. This is another area where teleconferencing can prove exceptionally valuable, as it allows for team-building games to be played. You might construct your own quiz, or you might set a series of arts and crafts challenges, or start a communal bake-off. There’s a great deal of fun to be had online, and it’ll help you to check in to see how everyone is doing.

An important fixture of many workplace’s social environment is a morning break for tea or coffee. You can simulate this online, and thereby help everyone to stick to the same working day. Parcel2Go’s head of operations, Phil Woodbridge, stresses the importance of “taking time out to do something different such as Pictionary, ice breakers, and fun facts. Making sure that people know we are there but to also give them time to themselves – we are all in this together.”

Don’t mention the C word

The Covid-19 situation being a source of continued stress for so many of us, many employers have gone so far as to set up an informal ban on mention of the word ‘coronavirus’ during social interactions. Of course, mention of the topic might be unavoidable, particular if some aspect of your work has been influenced by it. But if you want to create an online space that’s free from the word, it’ll probably be a good thing for your employees.

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