4 Challenges to Making The Most of Remote Work: A Business’ Solutions

Remote work is here to stay. A leading analyst firm, Gartner, has found that 82 per cent of company leaders plan on making remote working arrangements at least part of the time, even as pandemic restrictions start to lift. By the end of the year, 51 per cent of all knowledge workers worldwide will be working remotely as standard. The productivity gains are clear for all to see, and employees don’t want to return to the old ways of working, for morale and work/life balance reasons.

Despite all of this, however, remote work isn’t without its challenges, and these will need to be resolved as remote work becomes standardised.

Challenge #1: Burn out is a very real risk

When people work remotely, they generally find themselves working longer hours – starting earlier (there’s no commute, after all), and finishing much later (often deep into the night). In addition, working on the weekends becomes increasingly standardised. Without appropriate management and monitoring, burnout becomes a very real risk, which can ultimately undo all the productivity gains that remote working is meant to deliver.

The best solution here is for workplace regulators, unions, businesses and employees to come together to agree on reasonable limits on the structure and expectations that are placed on employees working remotely.

Challenge #2: Home technology becomes an issue

In the office, the business pays for a business-grade connection, and has technical support professionals on hand for when there’s an issue. When employees are working from home, however, there’s less quality control over the technology being used and support available for faults. There might be some issues that you can troubleshoot yourself, but if you need to get technicians out, or send equipment off to be repaired, then the downtime can be prolonged.

To address this challenge, employees should be supplied with a secondary Internet source (mobile broadband, for example), to minimise the impact of an outage. Furthermore, the IT team should apply remote support and patches to ensure that the employee’s computer is kept up-to-date and properly secure, limiting the risk of crashes and malware taking its toll.

Challenge #3: Collaboration and communication can break down

The modern employee needs to work in teams to get work done. Without proper communication channels, work can be disrupted, overlooked or misplaced, teams become inefficient, and there’s additional risk when document control isn’t properly managed. Additionally, for many employees, when they’re out of the office they can feel overlooked and ignored by their peers and bosses, which can result in dissatisfaction and the sense of career stagnation.

Providing employees with video conferencing tools is just the start here. The company really needs to invest in a combination of collaboration tools, including conferencing, voice, messaging, and document management. It’s also important that the company use progress tracking solutions to keep an eye on how all the small tasks within teams are getting completed so that the bigger picture projects can be achieved. They also need to ensure that there are policies in place to continue to engage all workers within their teams, and acknowledge successes and work well done. Finally, remote working can lead to a sense of isolation and loneliness, so it’s important to also encourage the use of these tools for team building.

Challenge #4: Dealing with distractions

Working from home is rarely the perfect environment, in that there will often be “home life” distractions ranging from family members through to particularly boisterous pets. Expecting an uninterrupted workday of 9-5 is just not realistic, and indeed, setting that expectation via company policy or monitoring a person’s working style too closely via keyloggers and the like when they work from home is a potential source of stress and anxiety.

The solution to this problem is to re-organise the workforce away from the idea of set hours in a day. Instead, set tasks that are reasonable for a typical day and week’s worth of work, and then set an employee’s KPIs against their ability to deliver on these projects. If that means they do some work in the evenings or weekends because they’ve helping kids with homework during the day, then that shouldn’t be an issue. Or if they prefer to rise early and get their work done so they can relax or enjoy a hobby in the afternoon, that should be encouraged too. Ultimately understanding that it’s the quality of the work done on time that’s important, rather than watching the clock, will result in a happier and more positive workforce.

Ultimately remote working will only succeed if employers and employees are aligned with it as a business strategy. It will mean some changes to how employees are organised and managed, but the payoffs – higher productivity and being an attractive place to work for skilled staff – far outweighs the change management program required to transition to this new and vibrant way of working.