Business group London First estimates that the strikes planned today on London’s underground could cost the UK economy around £100m, as quoted on the BBC news site today. The trouble is this would not be the first time tube strikes have directly affected UK revenues , and no doubt it will be the last. So how does the company based in Central London limit the damage of lost hours from employees taking longer to get to the office, or indeed not coming in at all? The simple answer is through remote working, and I know, before you even say it, not every company is set up for enabling employees to work from home or elsewhere. Well maybe not all of the time, but surely equipping those key employees to have their incoming calls re-routed home and secure access to their data for that ‘emergency’ such as a tube strike, is worth the investment of time and systems? We are not talking about reversing the everyday culture of an organisation here, what we need to do is simply embrace flexibility so that organisations are not plunged into chaos the minute the transport system in the city grinds to a halt. Let’s face it if it isn’t a tube strike, there could be any number of diruptions which restrict employees from working in the office on the odd occasion, such as; terrorist threats, flash floods, power failures, or even more simply office maintenance or re-decoration!
Tags: emergency, flash floods, flexibility, power failure, remote working, terrorist
