Home from home? When working from home becomes the new norm
When working from home becomes the new norm
When COVID-19 struck, thousands of workers had to decamp from office to home at short notice. So there was little opportunity for employers to carry out the usual checks and assessments in preparation for home working.
But businesses across the world are now anticipating that working from home will become the new norm for many key staff. And it is becoming clear to those organisations that they now need to take a step back and look at the changes required to make working from home sustainable and compliant.
If you find yourself in that situation, these are, in my opinion, some key areas you should consider:
Health and Safety
Employers are required to protect the health, safety and welfare of homeworkers. It was manifestly infeasible for most employers to carry out risk assessments when the virus struck. But you do now need to do those assessments and to recommend appropriate measures to reduce any identified risks. It is not possible for you to do a home visit, obviously, so I would suggest that you get each of your homeworking staff to do a video call with you or one of your team, using their mobile phone or tablet so that they can do a virtual home visit. Have them walk you round their work area, see what they sit on, where they store their paperwork.
You need to consider whether their workspace is temporary (eg dining room table) or permanent (eg study/spare room). We have people who’ve worked for us, very successfully, for years, who put their office together each morning and disassemble it each night so it can do a second shift as the dining table. Multi-function work-space and Health and Safety are not mutually-exclusive and good diligent people can make it work with the right guidance from you.
Things are especially tough right now as the kids are home from school needing study space, so bear in mind that you may need to take a phased approach as lockdown is gradually relaxed.
But right now, there are people working from their sofas, sat on dining chairs with no back support, or on high stools at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. There are laptop cables draped across the living room floor. And, as this goes from a temporary stopgap to a (semi) permanent situation, all these risks need addressing to find pragmatic solutions.
If you feel it would be useful to record the video calls you do, don’t forget you will need to get permission from your colleagues to do so and then treat the recordings as personal data and deal with them as you would any personal data in compliance with your GDPR policy.
Kit and Connectivity
Many of your staff will have company laptops, but those who were previously working on desktop machines may now be working on their personal laptop at home. In those instances, you need to ascertain who has access to that machine? Do the kids use it to ‘Zoom’ the grandparents? Does their partner use it from time to time? And does your budget allow for buying them a laptop, or will you move their desktop to their home? And is that a practical option in their home workspace? You could consider a ‘remote desktop’ environment on your staff’s own devices, allowing their work to be completed in a secure cloud area. There is a cost to set this up but it’s not excessive and certainly much cheaper than shelling out for new laptops.
Other key considerations:
· Is the existing domestic broadband reliable enough for the job, or do you need to install business broadband? And if so, which providers cover that location?
· Does any existing domestic broadband contract exclude use for business? Your staff may need to upgrade their contract or notify their supplier.
· If you are sticking with the existing broadband, how will the company contribute towards the costs?
· And what about printing and scanning? Is that needed and if so, how will that be done?
Security
Your team are probably handling commercially-sensitive or personal information, and some may have expensive company laptops and phones, so they need to be aware of physical security.
I’ve interviewed people who live in rural locations who generally wouldn’t bother to lock their front door if they take their dog out for 20 minutes, or when they go into the back garden for a barbecue, but if they have £2,000 or more of company equipment, and all of your CRM can be accessed from their laptop, that is not appropriate. Do they standardly shut down their laptop when they finish for the day or leave it plugged in and logged on so that (when we are all eventually allowed to go out again) the babysitter can access your servers or your Xero accounts records?
Google offers to save all your passwords for you but if you avail yourself of that offer that means that if someone gains access to your laptop, they have access into your systems.
And where will any hard copy documents be stored? Is there a need for them to be kept under lock and key and, if so, how can that be achieved? To be fair, this is not just a remote working issue. Our MD did some GDPR work with a client who had a ring binder containing all the staff’s personal contact, payroll and banking information sitting on a shelf in the unlocked reception area!
If your staff use Wi-Fi to connect their laptop, mobile, tablet etc to the internet, how secure is that? Can a neighbour sit in his garden and gain access to your customer data via your colleague’s laptop or router?
In a home environment the information security risks are not necessarily greater – industrial espionage is more likely to target a commercial building than a residence – but they are different and you will need to adapt your internet security policies, processes and procedures accordingly.
We’ve done a lot of work in this area and would be happy to discuss with you if you don’t have expertise in-house.
Insurance
You will obviously need to make adjustments to your business insurances but your remote staff will each need to notify whoever provides them with their home and contents insurance that they now work from home. The insurers with whom you insure the laptops and phones that you provide for your staff will need to be notified of the changes and will probably want to know about locations and physical security. So you may need to gather a lot of information from your staff.
And even if your staff are not using their personal computer or printer for work, if they fail to notify their insurers of a material change (eg the home is now being used for business purposes), it could invalidate their cover even if any subsequent claim is totally unrelated to their home working.
You might be able to save money by adjusting the cover on your company car insurance if your mileage is going to drop like a stone. Long term you may question whether you even need company cars but short term there could be a quick win on the premiums.
Stationery
If the team need printing supplies or other stationery, how will they buy them? Should they buy consumables themselves on an ad hoc basis and claim as expenses? That can cause loads of paperwork for your accounts team so you could consider using software like Spendesk if you have a big team. You will also lose out on any savings you were making through buying in bulk.
Maybe your existing stationery supplier can deliver to your staff, if they all live near the office? But how will that be administered? Or you can set up a central account online account from which all staff can order? The delivery charges can be excessive for multiple tiny orders so one of our smaller UK clients gets all his stationery from Amazon and uses his personal Amazon Prime account so the £80 annual fee covers all his consumable deliveries to all his staff and all the invoices are in one place as pdfs.
And what about coffee?! That probably sounds trite, but if you provide free tea and coffee for those who work on your premises, some bright spark may well ask you to pay for a jar of Nescafe for them at home. It’s probably not a priority but at some point you may want to look at an equitable solution.
Phones
If your existing phone system is not able to transfer calls out from your central number or divert calls from ddi to staff mobile phones, then you are not giving your customers the best user journey. Talk to your phone provider about how this could be achieved. We have a global VoIP system which gives amazing flexibility and enables us to conference, to forward calls to clients, and to present a variety of numbers – it’s the best investment we ever made and definitely worth considering as an option.
ISO
I hate to mention this, but if you have ISO accreditation then it will undoubtedly be impacted. Having said that, whoever did all the hard work to get your ISO awarded in the first place is probably going to be incredibly helpful to you. To get home working established as a sustainable, compliant business function will require a lot of lists, spreadsheets, action plans and good attention to detail – and your ISO implementation person(s) probably has the right skill set to support you.
Making the changes
What you are basically looking at here is a change programme that needs to be rolled out very quickly.
If you work in a substantial global business, then your Head of Change will doubtless have all this in hand, but, if not, I would suggest that as a first step, you rapidly review all your company policies and see which are impacted by this change.
You need to decide, right up front, what good looks like for home working in your organisation. What do you want your new norm to comprise? And the way you define that is through your policies. And if you don’t have policies, we have a policy writer on our team and can help you get the basics in place.
It’s tempting to frantically start randomly doing tactical stuff based on who or what is shouting the loudest but honestly it is really worthwhile to pause and look at your policies as a first action. That will help you to identify the areas that need to be addressed. And it will help you to get an overview of all the interlinked changes that you will need to make.
Once you have decided what good looks like and adjusted your policies, you will need to understand the current state of play for each home worker. And you will find yourself with a long list of questions to be asked of each of them. This is essentially an audit of the current state of play. If you don’t have the resources to write the questions or gather the information from your team, give us a shout.
That audit will identify actions needed in respect of each member of staff, and then you will need a plan to implement all those steps.
Someone needs to own this project. In a small organisation, it is you! If you have a larger team, it’s a good idea to assign a senior manager to project manage the process and implement the changes. If you have anyone on the team who has worked on an ISO implementation they almost certainly have the systematic mindset needed to get this all done.
That is not an exhaustive list but if you start looking at the issues I have touched on and if you carry out a review of all of your policies, that is a good start.
We have established a robust, remote-working infrastructure for ourselves, and helped other clients to do the same. We have helped clients to establish new policies and processes to meet changing business and compliance needs, and so we’re able to provide support with many of the issues that I have mentioned. If you would like to chat, reach out to Sarah at sarah.read@thecallbusiness.com.
