What is remote work exactly? Essentially it means working outside of your traditional office, most often at home. It is becoming common practice for businesses to allow their employees to telecommute. Many businesses are moving to the cloud at least partially; allowing for employees to work remotely.
Employees no longer have to be in office to get their jobs done because their work can be retrieved from almost anywhere. While remote work provides great convenience for some and can be economically beneficial for businesses many employers are still on the fence about it.
Here are just a couple things your boss might want to know about remote work before committing to it, according to the experts at Syntax IT Support London.
What’s the deal with security?
One of the biggest concerns that employers may have when it comes to approving remote work is data security. This is a valid concern as many small scale security attacks are caused my employee error; meaning they downloaded or clicked on something that infected a company’s system. Bosses may feel as though their businesses data could become vulnerable when employees are working remotely on several devices, sometimes from unsecured Internet. This can be combatted by creating a strong security plan, ideally working closely with your company’s IT department. Whether this includes issuing devices only for work use or secured mobile broadband dongles to be used remotely, protocol should be clear to all parties to safeguard that your company’s data remains secure while using the cloud remotely.
Remote Work Won’t Break the Bank
Remote work can actually safe a company a great deal of money of overhead costs. With more employees out of the office and working from home less physical office space is needed. This should be great news for your boss because renting office space is giant line item in most businesses budget. Usually the second largest line item in a company’s budget is either healthcare or company travel; travel eats up a good chunk because many companies have commuter incentives like monthly rail passes or mile reimbursement that they give to their employees that are traveling far distances to get to work. Allowing for remote work cuts that costs as employees aren’t having to spend large amounts for metro passes and gas to get to the office
How Will It Work
At this point traditional work environments come with little expectations. If you have been in the business world for some time you know what to expect when entering an office workspace. Everything has a system, from meetings to email response time. Bosses who are thinking about moving to remote work are going to wonder what the day to day will look like with staff not being in the same space. Your boss should know that setting up procedural protocol isn’t much different for remote work than it is for traditional workspaces. Along with your company’s HR department, your boss should solidify the expectations for remote work. This should include things like email response times and what services will be used to teleconference and chat amongst employees.
Flexible Schedules Equals Happier Employees
The truth of the matter is in today’s work place people are coming in with different needs and additional responsibilities that can make the work place harder than it needs to be. Family responsibilities and hefty commutes contribute to unhappy workers. Remote work helps solve some of those problems but allowing flexibility in employees’ schedules.
Bosses will probably find that their employees can work longer than the normal 9-5 schedule because of the flexibility that remote work offers. Essentially, as long as the quality of work remains high and deadlines are met bosses should be onboard with remote work because it makes for happier and often healthier employees. Employees who have been allowed to work from home have found to take less sick days and many attribute that to reduced stress and the ability to address their health before it get to ‘sick day’ level.