An Agile Workforce

More and more companies now either have remote workers or may be thinking about doing so.  Modern technology makes it so easy for a workforce to work anywhere; not necessarily altogether in one office.  Obviously not all job roles are suited to remote working, but more and more businesses are finding that some of their team can work away from the main site.

Let’s look at the Agile Workforce Terminology
Homeworker – home is the contractual base.  All the home office equipment required to do the job is provided by the employer.  A suitable risk assessment must be carried out, in the same way as if the employee was working at one of your sites.

Agile office worker – office is the contractual base. However a worker in this category would also be provided with the necessary equipment and technology to work from home.  Each week would vary but they would typically spend between 1 and 4 days per week working in the office.

Mobile office worker – office is the contractual base. However a worker in this category would also be provided with the necessary equipment and technology to work regardless of location.  This employee would typically average 1 day per week working in the main office; they would travel a lot and hot desk at different locations.

Off-site worker – office is the contractual base.  However a worker in this category would also be provided with the necessary equipment and technology to work regardless of location.  An employee in this category may spend periods of time working at client sites and the duration of such periods can vary and fluctuate.

Outsourced worker – this is where you have implanted one of your employees to work at a client site.  The contractual base for this employee will be the client’s site. Typically in this type of working the client provides the office equipment for the implanted worker.

Remote worker – this is a generic term that can be applied to any of your workers, who are not based in the office, day in day out, but who work somewhere (anywhere) away from the office either all of the time or on occasion.

Hot Desking – this term originates from the definition of being the temporary physical occupant of a work station or surface by a particular employee. The term hot desking is thought to be derived from the naval practice, called ‘hot bedding’, where sailors on different shifts share bunks.  Hot desking involves one desk shared between several people who use the desk at different times.  A major factor in hot desking is cost reduction through space savings.  The work surface could be an actual desk or just a terminal link. In any event the concept of the hot desk is that the employer furnishes a permanent work surface which is available to any worker as and when needed. There is no personal domain pertaining to a particular worker and physical facilities are employed as and when needed. A collection of such workstations is sometimes called a mobility centre.
Hot desking is regularly used in places where not all the employees are in the office at the same time, or not in the office for very long at all, which means actual personal offices would be often vacant, consuming valuable space and resources.
Hot desking can also include the routing of voice and other messaging services to any location where the user is able to log in to their secure corporate network. Therefore their telephone number, their email and instant messaging can be routed to their location on the network and no longer to just their physical desk. Improved technologies make this concept much more workable now than when it was first introduced in the 1980’s; e.g. virtual telephone numbers, soft phones on PC’s etc.

Enablers
A key factor in ensuring that any of the above agile worker solutions works in your company is ensuring you have the enablers to ensure success.  Suitable technology is a must but as well as that you need the right culture; a positive mind set and trust.  You must have suitable policies in place such as Remote Worker Policy, Homeworker Policy, and Hot Desk Policy. Lastly you need to have good processes to ensure employees regardless of their work base have job clarity, and understanding of their KPI’s and objectives.

Management
Managers need to manage their employee’s regardless of their specific working operation, performance appraisals, one to one’s and good communication are very important. Greater consideration needs to be given as to how to overcome challenges of remote working; it is harder to build and maintain internal networks with remote workers.  It makes sense to set up some formal network groups, this can be crucial for business development.  Managing poor performance is basically the same process regardless of worker location; communicate objectives, measure deliverables and the standards expected of a worker should be the same whether they work from home, in the office or anywhere else.

Team Dynamics
Bear in mind that remote workers have greater challenges regarding team building.  Make sure you have regular team meetings, team development events etc.; use conference call / video conferencing to maintain regular contact but make sure that you also have some face to face meetings as well. Encourage employees to participate in training courses, master classes and to contribute to the ‘bigger picture’.  Encourage informal team building.  Companies who use an agile workforce tend to encourage informal team building and encourage the use of social networking, in-line forums, virtual classrooms and e-learning.

Benefits of Homeworking
Dennis Gissing, Head of People Practices, BT Group said that BT initially trialled homeworking as a concept in 1984 and now have just under 10,000 home workers.  He categorises the benefits of homeworking as follows:

As always if you need any further information please contact your HR Consultant / HR Manager who will be happy to provide support.