Remote Working: It’s The New Normal

As most of you know, COVID-19 forced a lot of companies into a flexible working model that they were not prepared for. Most companies – and people – weren’t prepared for the dramatic changes brought about by COVID-19 full stop! Remote working was not something many companies would have considered, but the migration was smooth for many of them that didn’t have a choice. 

The thing is, people keep talking about what it’ll be like to get back to the office, and yet remote working can be successful in the long term – if you are prepared for it. You may have noticed that your costs would be dramatically different when you implement a remote working policy permanently, as in, you’ll save a lot of money but you do need to have a structured approach with a lot of investment in both your business and your staff to facilitate a permanent change. COVID isn’t going away any time soon, and if remote working has worked for your business, you can make it a new normal for you.

Challenges of Remote Working

While COVID may have knocked you sideways in your business for remote working, there are many challenges that you have to overcome with it. You may have already met these challenges during lockdown, but you may encounter:

1. Being structured in your approach while adjusting to having people working from home. Successful migration is hard, but when you are planning this to be long term, it gets easier to manage. You’d have to consider things like where your business mail will go, but with physicaladdress.com you can address this very quickly and it becomes a non-issue for your business. With the right planning, you can make this a smooth transition!
2. As companies move to remote working, you can be sure hackers are looking at ways to take advantage of lax security measures. Ransomware attacks are increasing both in scale and complexity so it is wise to invest in your cybersecurity as soon as possible. VPN Services, like NordVPN can be a huge time and money saver. Cloud-bases business VPN starts at just $7/month and it means your entire team can access your sensitive data via a secure connection. In fact, its worth signing them up with their own VPN accounts to ensure their devices are secured at all times, wherever they are working from. At just £3.79 a month, this is small change versus the cost and headache of dealing with a data breach.
3. The last one is the hardest challenge: balancing working from home and private lives of your employees. It doesn’t always impact productivity, so don’t think that your staff will be staring at the television instead of hitting their targets!

Remote working may not be something you were looking at offering, but technology today means that this is the new normal in a post-COVID world. You need to embrace it where you can and ensure that you have defined leaders to help this be a smooth move for your company. Once you have these goals defined, you can start working on being proactive and communicative with your staff. This improves collaboration and ensures that you manage your own expectations in this new way of doing things. 

Remote working isn’t going anywhere just yet, and you can make it an integral piece of the business puzzle in your company. Your employees will likely hop on board, too, as they won’t have a huge commute to get to work anymore! Communication is key to making this work!