Back to the office?

Tom Ryan at MarCloud argues that by forcing employees to work from an office, businesses are making a mistake and limiting their talent pool

 

Covid didn’t change the way we work, we’ve dealt with pandemics and national health crises before. Back-to-back nationwide lockdowns brought us here.

 

Unfortunately for tech employers, we are now at huge risk of sounding like parents when a child asks why they can’t spend another five minutes on their iPad. ‘Because I said so’ isn’t going to cut it anymore. Technologists understand the systems are there to support remote working.

 

Employees have experienced the efficiencies, work-life balance and flexibility of being able to work from home and have seen it work throughout the entirety of the lockdowns. Clearly, it is possible, so why go back to the old normal?

 

The office and your competition

Think about what actually happens in an office. It’s normally a vibrant place where lots of conversations happen and there’s the argument that ‘water cooler’ conversations spark creativity that would not happen otherwise.

 

But instead, why not be creative with intent? Schedule face-to-face meetings with your leading employees and don’t leave this water cooler idea to chance. Set aside time for pure creativity. Go for a beer if you need to. Just prioritise the time and make it happen.

 

Direct competitors might not be enforcing a return to the office also, and so you could end up losing your best team members as well as struggling to recruit new talent.

 

Benefits of remote employees

There are big benefits to employing remote workers. Here are my favourite reasons for this approach:

• Open the talent pool – Sorry to break it to you but London isn’t the only place in the UK where talented people live. If you adapt to remote working, you’ll reach other pools of talent in Manchester, Newcastle, Brighton, Glasgow, Portsmouth and so on.
• Deliverable-based approach – Assuming you have clear job specs, it should be easy to measure deliverables. Anything less than the deliverable is a failure from the employee and can be performance-managed based on the outcome. This simplifies the employer-employee relationship.
• Mitigate people problems – Your HR department will have time to focus on improvements, not fighting fires. The chances of employees upsetting each other, finding themselves in ‘situationships’ or generally being complicated are massively reduced when they spend far less time around each other.
• Reduce costs - Offices and travel are big costs on the P&L. Removing office costs and adapting your hiring strategy to align with business growth can mitigate this. If you do most of your business across the country, it can make commercial sense to hire across the country too. Trains are expensive these days…

 

Challenges to effective hybrid working

It isn’t all sunshine and roses though; what about the cons, you say?

• Visibility - If you can’t see something, is it really there? You may experience team members unexplainable absences, a lack of documentation or even extended periods of being offline.
• Compliance - Data privacy and protection is extremely important and companies need to have systems in place to mitigate risk of data leakage and weak home internet connections. Some businesses work with such sensitive information that it cannot be exposed to homes where unauthorised family or friends can easily access an unlocked device.
• Cheating the system - People naturally find the path of least resistance. Take those devices that wiggle your mouse to make it look like you’re online, for example. Expect people to cheat your system.
• Bad hires - When scaling a business, you will no doubt hire a few bad apples. It’s important to have a robust process for probation periods because if you don’t, these people will cause you a remote nightmare.
• Unprofessional employee behaviours - People will always be more brazen when behind a screen. Those difficult conversations might be harder to manage versus a simple face-to-face and you should expect to see some behaviours you wouldn’t normally see in the office.

 

Top tips for remote working

There are a lot of things to unpack while thinking about the remote working model, but when deciding the best approach for the business, here are four simple tips: 

• Adopt a deliverable-based approach to work that mitigates risk of people cheating the system, keeping hold of bad hires and removes any need to micromanage. An outcome is either achieved or it isn’t, so use this to your advantage. You’ll quickly see who the best people are.
• Invest in systems to support the remote structure. Think about compliance issues and work out if the benefits of remote work outweigh the risks. You’ll need to provide employees the correct training, equipment, secure Wi-Fi and channels to upload work safely and securely.
• Adopt a hiring strategy to attract the best people. The biggest perk of being able to hire remotely is access to top talent. Don’t squander this opportunity and have a poor recruitment process. Make sure you spend time on finding these individuals and do your best to keep hold of them.
• Use software to remotely measure and track employee engagement and happiness. You can keep your finger on the pulse by sending surveys and asking for feedback. This is key to monitoring staff happiness when face-to-face office interactions are less frequent.

Today, employees expect more than just good compensation and perks. If businesses want the best people, they must also accept they may not join the company if they’re forced to commute to an office just to show face.

 

This approach is ultimately becoming ever more important to bringing in top talent, particularly for small businesses, that might otherwise join competitors that are more in touch with their workplace needs.

 

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Tom Ryan is CEO of MarCloud

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com