How to make home working work!

Home working is becoming increasingly common across the UK for many administrative roles and knowledge workers. For employers it’s mostly driven by the desire to reduce costs and ease recruitment problems, and for employees it can offer a significant improvement in their quality of life.

In the South East there is a quiet, and far more widespread experiment in home working underway. Anecdotally, a major factor is that rail chaos and ticket price hikes are finally changing commuter behaviour. It’s certainly a fact that the number of passenger journeys in the SE and London has dropped (unlike the rest of the country) which is a remarkable reversal of the established trend. Most notably, journeys on season-tickets have declined significantly.

It has not been widely reported, but there is a dramatic change in worker behaviour underway. For many people commuting to the office is becoming an occasional event rather than the daily routine. However, too often, we see companies whose solution to homeworking is to simply give staff a laptop.

One of our sister businesses Freeman Clarke have created this CEO’s Briefing which addresses the strategic business and IT steps necessary to get homeworking working. It touches on recruitment, cost reduction,  team-working, cultural changes and collaboration. Specifically it describes team-working for home workers, technology and connectivity (including phone, video, online chat, txt and email) and the use of products such as Sharepoint, Teams, Slack, Trello, Basecamp, Wrike or WhatsApp.

To read the full article written by Freeman Clarke follow this link or if you’re interested in the concept of BYOD, which is jargon for workers who bring their own equipment to work (Bring your own device) then we’d suggest you read this post.

One of the benefits of working with People Puzzles is that we are part of the Liberti Group. As a whole, the group provides part time Directors in IT, Marketing, Finance and Legal, so you have access to a wide range of expertise for which you may not have an internal resource.

To discuss any of these issues or for more information about the benefits of working with a portfolio HR or IT Director please drop us an email.