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Leading homeworking

Leading homeworking
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We recently surveyed over 100 senior business leaders from across our global network.

In sharing the analysis and conclusions from this work we hope we can contribute to the wider conversation about where businesses go from here and how their leaders might take them there.

You can find the full survey report. We also asked senior leaders and consultants at Impact to provide their perspective on some of they key trends that emerged from the research. 

Helen Hibbott, Head of Impact Asia on leading home-working 

At risk of suggesting egg-sucking to a recently created global community of grandmas, here are a few things to consider while managing home-working at scale. (Please note, these are for non-key workers, in other words, those whose staff can perform their work remotely). 

  • Make home-working a deliberate policy at your company now. Even when back-to-work happens, it will likely be with social distancing in place, with potential future waves of returning to home-working. Make the policy cover lockdowns (periods when people look to government regulations) and non-lockdowns (periods when people look to company regulations).  

  • Some staff are keen to work from home and some staff are not. Consider both of these when drafting the policy and endeavour to meet people where they are. In our experience, these preferences are deeply personal and can change over time. They are dependent on a range of factors, such as the size or configuration of their living space, whether people feel safe at home, their internet connection, and of course the presence of very young children who accept that Mommy or Daddy leaves the house to go to the office but cannot accept that she/he is just behind that door. In a nutshell, offer flexibility if you can.  

  • Offer help and support. This can include tips on setting a routine at home, remote team management and, of course, kit. If everyone is locked down, providing a keyboard, mouse and monitor can make a massive difference to the incidence of backpain in your workforce.  

  • Finally, a word on evaluation. Many people worry that they won’t be able to judge how well others are doing their jobs when they are not in the same physical space. Our challenge to you is: How do you judge them when you are in the same physical space? If you have evaluation criteria that are difficult to apply to home-workers, perhaps those criteria should be re-evaluated.