7 benefits of encouraging remote working
Can remote or hybrid working really be beneficial for my business?
Here are 7 major benefits to embracing remote working.
Staff retention
In the post-covid era, companies need to be remote-working friendly. That doesn’t mean reluctantly facilitating it. It means deliberate and positive momentum designed to encourage, support, and empower remote colleagues. With the right systems and approach, you can retain your valued workforce, foster, and demonstrate your trust in the backbone of your business. Staff are now actively looking for remote / hybrid work models in current or new employment as they move to new “less commutable” areas or become used to the positive work-life balance of working remotely, whilst at the same time, delivering all that the company needs.
Hold on to key staff and be able to recruit more in the future with a new enthused outlook on remote working.
Staff wellbeing
It’s more than a change of premises. It’s an emotional and family-orientated wellbeing evolution. Remove the morning gauntlet of commuting, the evening drudgery, the additional fuel and toll costs, the longer hours of travel where you are neither being productive for the company nor enjoying family life. Removing further stresses and encouraging a positive work life balance will de-stress, inspire, and support your happier colleagues who will reward your loyalty and trust in turn.
Decreased operational costs
Where do we start? Office running costs, in some cases even the offices themselves will have drastic savings as more companies more to a distributed model without the need for expensive premises or leases. Day to day facility running costs are reduced, expensive IT servers, upgrades, workstations, maintenance contracts are eliminated as you move to the cloud. Even the reduction in company travel due to web conferencing tools increases productivity and reduces costs. The savings are tangible and real and will foster a lean and efficient business model that is infinitely scalable.
Include the excluded
Your previous remote colleagues such as sales reps, volunteers, site, or service colleagues who worked outside the office pre-Covid, had a mix of antiquated systems and processes to deal with. From ringing in with customer or stock queries, to manual expenses, clunky timesheets, faxing or emailing in orders. They were the “Oliver Twist” of data and systems. Whilst head office colleagues had more joined up systems and processes, the “outside “colleagues suffered with bolt-on processes and tools in many cases.
Now all are equal. With more office-based colleagues now working remotely, the need for cloud solutions to better manage all the disparate areas of diverse organisations is more prevalent. Everyone can now use the same unified systems, conform to the new company-wide workflow practices, have far greater access to essential data, systems, and support, and provide far greater service to your customers and their own teams and colleagues.
Reimagined workflow practices
By introducing new remote-friendly workflow practices you can streamline your organisation, delivering efficiency, visibility, accountability, and improved customer and colleague benefits.
These heretofore manual tasks, physical in-trays, manual invoice approvals, that rely on inter-office proximity, are past. In a digital future all you requisitions, approvals, claims, reporting, and transaction processing is digital, efficient and workflow based. Your business is now on-demand!
Evolving to digital workflow practices, provides greater security, visibility, and accountability for the company in its operations and it’s planning. Staff are rewarded with more efficient tools, smarter ways of working, reduction in duplication and data re-keying. The future of a digital workflow-based organisation will not resemble the old and clunky procedures of before and adopting them willingly will ensure your continued success.
Business continuity
The dreaded motorway snowy winter morning where everyone is stuck in traffic and at 9.01am, you are still waiting for colleagues to arrive. The public transport failure. The server glitch stopping colleagues from working, the infamous power outage.
Removing the key critical points of failure for dispersed colleagues with cloud always-on solutions enables your colleagues to be available with increased flexibility, gives your organisation more up-time, improved customer responsiveness, and more collaboration from happy and a less stressed workforce.
Build for the future
You are investing in not just technology, but processes for the next decade. By moving to a SaaS business model (Software as a Service) you can plan with fixed monthly SaaS licence costs, no more costly server rebuilds, or purchase of expensive software. You are creating a business and workforce model that’s robust, workflow friendly, efficient, resilient, affordable, and productive. It is a model that can easily be replicated and expand as you grow and taken into other counties, and indeed countries. You are not bound by physical limits of connectivity and travel. You are future proofed.
Cloud and the digital future are already here, and your competitors are already adopting such policies. Even if it is not for today, a digital plan should be on your radar for the coming 3 to 5 years ahead. That can be hosted solutions, True-Cloud solutions or a myriad of technologies and apps, but one thing is for sure, the future doesn’t include doing the same things we have always done, the same way.
If you would like to talk Cloud and Accounting systems and see how your business could look in the new world, please give me a call. I’d love to talk all things Digital.
Alan Connor
Managing Director
iplicit Ireland
- June 17, 2022
- 9:32 am