As a home worker myself for many years here are my Top Ten Tips to help employers set up their employees with the ability to work from home or other location during the swine flu pandemic, produced in conjunction with ‘Pandemic Flu Guideliness for Business’:
1. Identify which employees can easily work from home. Working from home should provide the employee with the ability to undertake the vast majority of their normal job responsibilities, particularly if they are desk based. This is easily achieved by equipping them with secure data access and a telecoms system which enables them to answer their incoming calls just as if somebody was calling them at their normal place of work. This technology is easy to implement and is fast becoming the norm for many organisations.
2. Define the nature of the work to be undertaken by each employee and you will be able to provide the IT and telecoms tools necessary to seamlessly continue undertaking their job from home, as if they were at their desk in their normal place of work. You may wish to consider implementing tools such as incoming call re-routing and wireless/ 3G data connection applications delivering secure access to your corporate network.
3. Develop a checklist or agreement so that both employer and employee understand the terms under which home working is allowed. As a consequence, employees will then understand how home working will be managed and facilitated by the employer, because safety and security is crucial within such an arrangement.
4. Consider any other issues, such as how costs for heating, lighting, phone bills, and broadband access may be re-imbursed to the employee.
5. Consider how the employee will securely access corporate data and systems, such as via a corporate and secure VPN or secure web based email systems. Don’t forget to ensure a company directory of contact information is readily available.
6. In order to ensure home workers don’t feel isolated and to facilitate meetings you may want to make tele/ web conferencing or regular email/ web chat and Intranet communication available. These tools are easy to implement and relatively cheap. Some web conferencing packages offer free 30 day trials.
7. Communicate health and safety requirements for minimum home working standards and ensure employees comply. This is not as daunting as it appears. What you require for your employees in the office is just the same as what you would require for employees at home, including risk assessments. It’s just at a different location.
8. Ensure that employees can receive their incoming calls. Customers and suppliers should not be given a new number to call, they should be able to get through to the person they have dialled on their regular published contact number, rather than a new mobile or landline number to ensure seamless customer service and business continuity. This also protects the privacy of the employee by not publishing their personal mobile or home phone numbers to the public.
9. Management of home workers is not difficult as long as regular communication between team leader and employees is maintained. For the manager who fears losing control, secure voice recording of re-routed phone calls is easy to introduce as is keyboard key stroke monitoring.
10. Finally don’t expect sick employees, or carers to be accessing their emails as regularly as if they were in the office. You are giving them the tools to allow them to do what they can within a relationship of trust. Even if they are only able to work for example at 30% capacity every day, this could save your organisation between 7 and 10 days worth of 30% capacity which you would have lost were they not able to work from home!
If you found these tips useful, you may also wish to visit our blog for future tips and helpful advice on flexible working and the flu pandemic:
Recession and Swine Flu: A lethal combination?
Swine Flu: A greater threat than terrorism?
Swine Flu: Will your organisation survive?
Swine Flu Pandemic: Would Your Employees Take Advantage?
Author: Karen Jones
Tags: business continuity, flexible working, home working, pandemic flu guidelines for business, swine flu, telecoms, VPN, web conferencing
