Day 1
Working from home
OPINION: Fundamental changes - What we can learn for business and work life that could happen as a result of COVID 19.
“These are unprecedented times” These are the words shared to us by the government of New Zealand and in a fews days the country will be in lockdown. Not only do we have to work from home but now there may be no toilet paper either…oh no!
Anyways back to the point — Not so surprising to me now, I have realised how being at home (especially with no kids around) can help with being more focused in comparison with the daily distractions that we can have in a traditional work place leaving you more time to fit other aspects of life in.
(Side note would still come to work to see the mobile teams beautiful faces irl — Read till the end fingers crossed this gets better 🤞)
80% of the population according to Global workplace analytics have said they would like the ability to work from home some of the time. Interestingly a large portion of these are millennials who ironically aren’t the ones choosing to work from home. Research has also shown that having face to face interactions with your team can be good for culture and wellbeing.
We have been doing all our remote conferencing the same way for a long time and now that most people are forced to do it we have had time to think about how we can make this process better, funner, and more enjoyable. There are many articles online already going through this. A Kiwi company named Hoku has done this well here.
The future of working from home
There is a lot of cost associated with business travel and even personal travel, weekly many of us may pay a minimum of $40/week for public transport. We all love travelling overseas but I am sure as a result of COVID-19 many people may choose not to go realising they can be more efficient with time and ensure they are with there loved ones more frequently. This may mean existing processes will have to change and be redesigned to accomodate this old-new way of working. Being able to work from home and hopefully at some point again anywhere in the world would mean that for a business we can tap into many different talent pools. Being able to hire people from across the globe who have the ability to work remotely (with trust) could be the new norm for not just the IT industry. Currently people who may be working in a call centre or people with a lot more experience tend to work from home as they are likely to have senior positions (Stereotypically more trustworthy). But there is a possibility now if everyone does this whole working from home thing correctly that we can have a satisfactory level of culture and flexibility to justify a larger portion of a workforce working remotely moving forward if they choose.
Conventions
Courtesy of COVID-19 we will be able to see if the cancellations of so many conventions (WWDC, Google IO etc) are also going to impact sales and determine if it’s justifiable in terms of travel cost for a business to send there employees overseas in the future. At present it is not easily quantifiable the benefits of these events because all the information is available in a matter of minutes later anyways as we are witnessing first hand. But obviously everyone loves a ‘free’ trip sooo maybe many companies may now use it as a perk? 🤷🏼♂️. Looking at the supply chain moving forward we might start thinking about how we can diversify where our businesses are run from just in case events like this happen again and fortunately for global companies this was already starting to happen. Manufacturing is starting to move to other countries away from China, the likes of Thailand and Vietnam where there is also cheaper labour. Many countries are also afraid to take business away from China as they don’t want to risk having a bad relationship with them. Regardless, for now some of these changes we are experiencing might actually stick!
Thoughts 💡
As we are aware the trend of flexible working was definitely kicking off, we are fortunate at Datacom to have this freedom but now that the whole world has to do it and people have seen how productive an individual can still be whilst having this flexibility of working with shorts on 😎. I can foresee this trend really being expedited. When working from home it is important to stay in contact with your team more often as there always will be that stigma at least for the immediate future around are people really ‘WORKING’ 👨💻. That might not be the right approach, as we have found regardless of if you are home or not — if you are getting the work done at a high standard with ample communication then why can’t you save your commute time moving forward? maybe go fishing or do some gardening instead. People don’t fundamentally change in a different environment. Yes, they may have other distractions but maybe that is the area we should focus on rather than judging if people are ‘Gaming’ 🎮 during traditional work hours for example. Just maybe it doesn’t matter any more?
