The Benefits of Remote Work and How to Manage It

Telework has many very interesting facets for organizations and both for their employees. But what are the advantages of teleworking within a company and how can we ensure that the work performed by employees is properly monitored? Pierre Boulay of Procol Inc. answers your questions on this subject.

The advantages of teleworking

An economy for businesses and employees

In these difficult times, everyone will benefit from substantial savings. According to InnoVision Canada, a telework consulting firm, Each teleworker represents a savings of $5,000 per year in office space for businesses.

Another economy, which is more deceptive, is to avoid staff turnover costs. Several companies have managed to retain their best elements within their team thanks to this solution. And what about personal cash savings employees make on clothing, transportation costs and travel time.

The telework offer that a company can offer its candidates can be a very powerful attraction for new generations. We all know that the offer will be reduced, so the competition will be fiercer. Indeed, a study predicts that demand for talented candidates will increase by 35% over the next 5 years, but that supply will decrease by 15%. The question will then be: What can organizations do to attract and retain good employees? Unfortunately, there is no magic solution, but rather a combination of several effective strategies.

Telework is rapidly becoming a recruitment and retention strategy that at the same time brings other benefits to the company. For the next generation, employees have a high value in teleworking, allowing them to succeed in reconciling work and family, as well as reducing the costs and stress associated with work in the company.

The possibility of having a contingency plan

Another benefit is the possibility of having a contingency plan in the event of certain unforeseen events or when employees cannot or should not return to the office, But they could still participate in the company's business continuity. This contingency plan may be necessary when an unexpected event damages the company's very premises such as a fire, flood or any other damage preventing employees from returning home.

The worst case is a pandemic of avian influenza where it would be cruel, if not inhuman, to require employees to report to work. Some contingency plans foresee that such a possibility could result in the closure of schools for up to three months and the cancellation of groups such as sporting, artistic and other events.

The U.S. government used the hurricane assessment scale to calibrate an influenza pandemic. In this way, the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed half a million Americans, would be classified as category 5, while the 1957 Asian flu that killed 70,000 Americans would be classified as category 1.

Benefits of Process Management Software

Collaborative work, monitoring progress and measuring work

Photo: Unsplash

Considering that young people of new generations have fallen into technos when they were small, there will be no problem for them to follow a computerized procedure. In addition, the new generation wants information to be transparent, which runs counter to the tradition of controlling company information.

So, for telework to be acceptable to employers and also satisfactory to employees, good process management software must be in place. Such software enables enterprises to transfer knowledge easily and creates the necessary conditions for teleworking. Indeed, the software allows those in place to describe the different operations and activities required to process the files according to the various processes required, with ease and efficiency.

In addition, at any time a supervisor or person who must respond to the client may verify the status of the processing of a file and inform the client. The user will be able to see the various steps of the file path by obtaining information such as the date, time and name of the provider. It will also be able to view the documents that have been added to the file and who has the file in hand at the time of its audit.

Supervisors must have all the necessary tools to see, at a specific time, the workload of each stakeholder. In addition, they must be able to make performance statistics for each by analysing the volume of transactions processed, the average time allocated per file, outstanding files, those that are late, etc..

Supervisors must have tools that they don't even have when employees work in the office. Employees put employers in confidence by their presence alone. Several dashboards are intended to allow supervisors to really see what's going on across the organization's various business lines. One of them is intended to visualize the volume of work done by each of them, thus enabling the performance of employees to be assessed.

Efficiency is also enhanced by the use of good process management software, It is the computer program that must orchestrate the multiple activities among the stakeholders. As soon as an intervenor has completed its activities on a file, it must be transferred instantly to the next intervenor by forwarding all documents in the file as well as all information on the follow-up.

In addition, the speaker must be informed of the work to be done and will be able to consult supporting documents in order to carry out his task effectively. A checklist may be used to ensure that he or she has not forgotten anything before letting the software track the file to the next stakeholder.

Author: This article was written by Pierre Boulay, head of Procol Inc., a computer consulting firm which he founded in 1978. Over the course of its existence, the Commission has developed expertise in software development and document management systems (papers and now electronic), in addition to focusing its efforts on developing new tools to support collaborative business process management.