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What should employers be doing for employees who are working from home

As we approach the anniversary of going into lockdown in South Africa it’s clear that the “new normal” is fast becoming normal, but that begs the question, are we really at a point where working from home and all the fixings that come with it, is a viable alternative to going into an office?

There have been numerous surveys asking employees and employers whether they want to work from home or work from an office and, responses are as varied as people are.

Some folks want to work from an office while others are quite happy to continue working from home and others would prefer a mix of the two.

But today we want to focus on what an employer should be doing for an employee that is working from home.

We understand that March 2020 was a mad rush to keep businesses afloat with the prospect of offices being no-go zones but as the pandemic shows no signs of abating any time soon, it’s time to have an earnest discussion.

For instance, should a company be paying for at the very least subsidising your internet connectivity. We’d argue that yes it should be subsidising your internet, especially in South Africa where the cost of connectivity is immense. Further to that, the cost of mobile data is extremely expensive in South Africa and as fibre isn’t a luxury everybody can afford, serious considerations should be made to how employees get online.

Somebody that echoes this sentiment is Euphoria Telecom chief executive officer, John Woollam.

“A two-year Stanford study found that remote contact centre workers were 13 percent more productive than their office-bound counterparts,” says Woollam. “But in a country facing the challenges South Africa does, no organisation can simply send their workers home and expect everyone to perform as well as they would in the office.”

The study Woollam mentions is explored in this TEDxStanford talk from 2017.

South Africans also have to contend with loadshedding and that presents an even bigger problem than connectivity. Just this morning loadshedding in an opposite neighbourhood knocked out our internet for two hours leaving us scrambling to get online. When loadshedding does hit we might have signal but no power.

Employers need to take things like this into consideration and provide solutions for employees. That could take the simple form of allowing an employee to work on a flexi-time basis or providing them with an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) so that an employee can at the very least save their work and let others know their power is off.

Cloud-based telephony should also be considered, especially for employees who spend a large amount of time on the phone.

“Businesses can also benefit greatly from embracing cloud-based telephony. Doing so not only allows them to control and manage their company phones from anywhere, but it can also save on the cost of phone bills, free them from long-term contracts and enable them to easily scale up and down according to demand,” explains Woollam.

The most important consideration to make however, is that if you make the lives of employees more difficult they will leave. While the pandemic and lockdown have hurt the economy tremendously, if employees aren’t happy and they have to fight just to work, they will leave.

It’s vital then that employers engage with employees and find amicable solutions to the problems they face. Sometime it might be as simple as giving employees a Friday afternoon off to relax but it could also be more complex like say a person doesn’t have internet connectivity at home.

The key is communication and clear lines of communication at that. The world of work has shifted dramatically in the last year and if employers aren’t willing to adapt, well, you know how the adage goes.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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