Productivity is measured by the rate of output per unit of input. Improving productivity means more available time and higher profit margins for business owners. The forced remote worker situation caused by the recent pandemic lockdown appears to have established a new normal for part of the New Zealand workforce who recognise less travel and better communication efficiencies enhances their work-life balance while improving productivity.
During the COVID-19 lockdown business quickly adopted technologies that have been available to them for over a decade—one of the most talked-about technologies being video conferencing. We discovered we could maintain a high level of personalised engagement with workers and customers using live web-based video conferencing, and with this, significant cost savings.
An essential contributor to remote working being successful is ubiquitous access to broadband in the home and secure network access available as standard via Microsoft Office platforms. More people trusting video conferencing and using technology means our approach to business can change.
Why has remote working now possible?
Remote access requires web-based systems that are secure and fast. Broadband, while not new, has only recently become accessible with the balance of speed, data bandwidth, and affordability. The comprehensive rollout of Fibre and large data caps driven by video content streaming has meant that working from home is possible. Microsoft cloud-based office systems involving secure file access is a standard practice requiring little to no additional expenditure for business owners.
Trust in your Workers
There must be systems in place that support remote workers. Humans need to engage, be directed, receive structured feedback and importantly feel valued. This all links with what will keep them motivated to work. Often the weakness in remote working efficiencies is in managements capability to alter their way of delivering and maintaining workflow. Lockdown showed many businesses that not only were they able to maintain a remote workforce, but productivity significantly improves.
Is Remote Working for Everyone?
Not all people respond well to the real or perceived isolation that separation from the traditional workplace affords. For some, the interaction with fellow workers is essential. The meme that circulated in the early days of lockdown “Introverts, talk to your extrovert friends, they don’t know what is going on” goes some way to explain this.
The one size fits all concept, whether applied to office-based or remote working is a myth. Every person has different personal and professional requirements that are linked to their own values and motivational drivers. For remote working to work, there needs to be a well-managed personalised system in place for every worker.
The New Normal.
Moving forward, we need to learn to adopt a new way of doing things. By sticking to traditionalist methodologies just because it used to work well means you risk rapidly losing market share to more technology-savvy competitors in an increasingly globalised marketplace.
Like education, a form of blended learning is more effective than just class-based or online learning. Mixing self-directed and face to face engagement has proven itself more effective.
By using this same concept, we can allow workers to reduce commute time and time-wasting meetings for meeting sake by adopting web-based systems while still allowing the face to face engagements to happen.
Invest in learning, invest in people
Most business under-invest in learning. Well-meaning but time-poor business management often overlook the human aspects of their workforce. People will be influenced by their roles, their industry, their environments, education, and personal circumstance. Only when management practices and systems improvements to ensure all workers are well managed, and well cared for will business efficiencies and productivity be perfected.
The reality, changing markets and economies means perfect is not possible. The challenge and opportunity are to allow for change to ensure we at very least evolve fast enough to grow and be relevant.
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