Remote Workers – What Shirkers
The Shirkers. Unreliable employees will absolutely abuse the luxury of remote working.
During our first work from home pilot, we quickly learned that some employees took advantage of the freedom. In some cases, they treated it like a holiday. Bunking off!
Unfortunately, we had to pull the plug on some people. In retrospect, it only advanced a decision that would have taken us much longer, had we not measured performance as part of the pilot.
What we found was that most people don’t sit around in their PJ’s, watching Netflix.
Smart workers will work productively anywhere, whereas, shirkers will shirk wherever they are supposed to be working. The trick is to choose reliable people in the first place. Learn more
Productivity
Indeed, in our experience, 95% of people respect this autonomy and reward it with greater productivity.
Over the years, we have seen a striking difference between the output of hundreds of people working remotely versus in the office. Productivity improves, in general, by circa 13% – that’s almost one day per week.
We’ve also developed a system of 2-way updates that we manage through Slack chats instead of face to face meetings. Consequently, we found this freed up a lot of time spent in mindless meetings.
Salary versus Lifestyle
As a business, when you adopt a smart workforce model, you begin to compete differently in the labour market. Where Dinosaurs continue to compete on salary, you begin to win the war for talent by competing on Lifestyle compensation.
Retention improves because you are giving Employees some time back. Your people are happy to lose the commute and spend more time with their family or their hobby. We measured an improvement of a massive 80% in one organisation!
Culture improves too. When Employees are happier, the whole business begins to sparkle. Satisfied Employees give a better service to their customers and so the business thrives. We all want to be a part of a successful and growing organisation, don’t we.
So, all that’s left is for you to get your head around which smart options might work in your business and which to avoid.
