Remote Working: what we are doing to support our employees
It is quite clear to everyone now that remote working is not a temporary thing: first, the pandemic itself isn’t going away in a few days; and, second, I don’t believe anyone in our industry will go back to the office 5 days a week when it’s over, so working remote - even just part of the week - is here to stay.
When we saw what was happening early on before any client had actually left their offices, we bought monitors and asked our people to test their internet speed and reliability and get 4G modems if needed. We arranged desks, headsets and whatever was necessary for people to have a good and comfortable work environment at home. We ran a brainstorming session of good and bad practices of working remote in one of our fortnightly (now virtual) Learning Lunches, and each group came up with some very good tips.
“We needed to have a permanent policy that allowed our employees to be comfortable, efficient and feel good at home or another place they chose to work from.”
You're not working remote if you're not taking Gallery View photos.
Those arrangements were originally a one-off and somewhat temporary but now that this has been going on for most of the year (and will become where we work from anyway) we felt we needed to have a permanent policy that allowed our employees to be comfortable, efficient and feel good at home or another place they chose to work from. Maybe you miss your standing desk, maybe it’s the super comfortable (and expensive) office chair, maybe it’s having a whiteboard to sketch your thoughts on or maybe it’s the dual 32” monitors.
With that in mind, at Pragmateam we have just broadened our PragmaThanks employee recognition program to include expenses that support a better remote working environment. In a nutshell, PragmaThanks works like a ‘rewards program’ where employees receive 40 points per year that they can spend in Learning & Development activities at their discretion: no management approvals, no red tape, just spend and get reimbursed. They can use points to take time off for training or volunteer work and each 1 point = $100. In short, 40 PragmaThanks points equate to $4,000 of expenses a year for each employee.
Now that Remote Working expenses have been added to the program, employees can buy:
Desk, chair, whiteboard, monitor stand etc.
Monitor, mouse, keyboard, headset, webcam, speakerphone
4G modem, 4G data, wifi router, access point
Co-working space visit or membership
And this is complementary to the spending on conferences, training, books and others which were already part of the program as Learning & Development.
Since we changed the policy, people have been making good purchases to improve their working environment and have been generally quite happy to be able to do so, with feedback ranging from “This literally changed my life” to “I bought 3 things I didn't think I needed" which is great to hear.
In this period of remote working it’s surprisingly (and disappointingly) common to see people in video calls working in a very improvised environment, without proper furniture, a decent chair, a monitor, good headsets or speakerphones and - shockingly - a fast and stable wifi connection to properly communicate. Not only is this frustrating for everyone involved, but it’s bad for productivity and would no doubt be costing businesses more than the cost of a proper work from home setup. And this is not people's fault since it's their home, not the office.
Employers who have people working from home (and being productive) and that later even downsize their offices will save millions of dollars but some of that money has to go towards setting up a home environment that allows people to be as productive as possible. In our case, as a consultancy, even though we did not have that expense previously (the vast majority of our employees are working in client sites) we felt it was our responsibility to make sure employees had what they needed working from home or remote without paying for it personally and I hope to see more employers make the investment to have an enterprise-grade setup for their remote/WFH employees.