The idea
The idea of transferring your employees to home office format of work itself is quite sensible. There are lots of candidates who want to work remotely on the market. And current economic crisis provokes the process of growing of the number of such candidates. So, you have a perfect chance not only to reduce expenses on personnel but also to power it up by recruiting of high-qualified employees from other regions.
So, before making the plan of transferring employees to remote work it is important to work on following key aspects:
- Estimate cost advantage. Calculate how much does upkeeping of one workplace of the office cost and compare it with expenses on one remote employee. It is important to take into consideration all possible expense items, not only a wage.
- Estimate what employees are really ready to work remotely. It also depends on the character of work and on personal characteristics of an employee. To estimate the possibility of transferring from the point of functionality, think of what duties need an employee to be present at the office. You will be surprised how small the number of such duties is. To understand is a person able to work remotely, make him work remotely 1 day a week, then 2 or 3 days a week, etc. If everything goes right and you see in a time tracker that he works as effectively as at the office, you can transfer him to a constant home office format.
- Feel the difference between remote workers and freelancers. Freelancer is a free employee who can work with several different companies at the same time. If a freelancer find a place where he is paid better, his priorities can change straight away. That is why such specialists are hired for one project. Remote employee is a common full-time worker but his office is at home. That is why you can make a labor contract with him and monitor his work activity by a time tracker.
Implementation
There is an opinion that remote work makes employees lazy and careless, their productivity lowers and it is really difficult to work with them. It is not quite correct opinion because if you do everything right home office is easier in managing than a standard one. Here are rules which you need to use on the stage of implementation:
- Assess work according to results, but not according to time spent. If you arrange a correct work process and motivation system, a remote employee will spend even less time on work than an employee at the office. Of course you should check time tracker results, but only in correlation with the number of activities made.
- Record the whole work process. In order to control and to prevent misunderstanding with a remote worker, try to record everything concerning your communication. Use a time tracker to see how many work tasks are made and what time was spent on them.
- Use the system of everyday reports. It is very useful for realizing how much an employee exerts himself and you will have the opportunity to correlate it with a time tracker report in order to see the whole picture.
- Give your employees the opportunity to feel that they are a team. Use different tools to arrange communication as it is real.