Will things remain the same?

As we are in the middle of COVID-19 and there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel, we are starting to think of the aftermath. What will this have done to us as a business? What will employees demand? What will the new work culture demand? What have we learned?

As we gear up to kick off our businesses again. Things will never be the same. There are some positive things that we can find in all this chaos.

First of all, we have had the opportunity to try the work from home experiment without having to build some massive business cases as to why it would be a good idea. There have been many executives that were totally against it. I have set up several work at home solutions for clients so that you could have a nimble workforce. But it wasn’t easy. There were always the detractors or old school executives who just felt that they had to see a human body basically punch in and punch out. You even got rewarded and a pat on the back if you stayed past our 8 hours. Some stayed 12-14 hours just to show commitment to the company. Basically they didn’t go home until the boss went home so that they could show how committed and how hard they worked.

Now that you have been forced to accept work from home (WFH), you might be finding that it wasn’t bad at all. Or you could be facing total chaos. If you are facing chaos, is it because this solution will just not work for you? In the rare case yes. In the majority of cases, there are other underlying reasons.

Some of the reasons that your WFH initiative will fail are:

1. You don’t have a proper roadmap of what WFH should look like
2. Have you outlined the technical requirements and SLAs with your IT group on how technical issues will be addressed? This shouldn’t be much different than onsite.
3. Do you agents know what their workspace should look like so that they are not interrupted while working.
4. How do you know your agents are doing a good job? This is where a Scorecard with key KPIs comes into play.
5. What will your virtual training have to look like? This is key in providing constant training to your employees to keep the skills alive.
6. What will coaching look like? Supervisors have to make sure they schedule regular 1-1s as well as providing real-time feedback to their agents to keep them on the right path and motivated.
7. You will need to have a strong Knowledge Base or CRM system so that your agents always have the tools at their fingertips. This shouldn’t be much different than what you have onsite. However for a WFH initiative, it is even more important that you have an effective CRM system.

This are just some of the things to think about in order to ensure that your WFH initiative is a success.

As a reward, you will get motivated employees that will provide an even better customer experience because they will not have had to fight the traffic to get to work. Not to mention the extra time that it buys them every day.

To you as a business, well there will be facilities savings, happier employees and improved customer experience, This will all help to lift your bottom line.

A thought to leave you with. What effect will this have on the open space work environments? Would be great your thoughts on this.