A work-at-home strategy during COVID-19 will ensure that at least some of your team will be working from home and creating business resilience. With the entire world facing the COVID-19 crisis, it’s only natural that many of my colleagues are highlighting the work-at-home-agent solutions (WAHA) offered by Teleperformance right now. Beyond creating business resilience, I think there is a bigger story playing out here.
There is a more general move towards the normalization of working at home that we are not seeing right now because the news agenda is focused on just how many people are suddenly required to work from home. Let’s step back for a moment and consider what advantages you get by creating a team that works from home, at least some of the time:
You can hire the best people: With office-based workers, you can only hire people who are within commuting distance of work. Once you remove this restriction you can raise the bar and hire the very best people, regardless of their location. This also allows you to hire for niche skills, such as gamers, rather than customer service skills alone.
Security has evolved: Two-factor security, encryption, and software that can be used on home agent devices ensure that the remote worker operates in a restricted and controlled environment.
Training is now easier: Onboarding and ongoing training is now far easier than it was just a few years ago because live video and Learning Management Systems have evolved and now offer a far better experience for remote workers. It is now easier to train 50 people inside a virtual classroom than to manage the same session inside a real classroom.
Flexibility: You can scale up quickly just by onboarding new team members. You don’t need to rent a new office or find a way to squeeze new people into your present office.
Resilience: As the COVID-19 pandemic is proving, it can really help with business resilience and continuity if you do not have your entire customer service team all in one place.
Today, around 43% of Americans work sometimes from home. Globally that figure is closer to 70%. The present wave of people being forced to work from home is only an extension of what has been happening anyway. It’s true that for those suddenly forced to work from home, some support may be required, but for almost half of Americans, working from home occasionally is now a normal activity.
When a crisis hits, your customer service team will be challenged. Building in the resilience that a work-at-home strategy during COVID-19 makes sense when it is clear that many companies are struggling to maintain normal service levels during this pandemic. But resilience is not the only advantage of this strategy. Once you start listing all the benefits, it is clear that every executive should take this opportunity to review their own approach to working from home.
I'll be hosting a TP Talks Webinar on March 26th on this subject.
For more information on Teleperformance’s Work-at-Home Solutions, please click here. If you have any comments on working from home or the topics raised in this article, then please leave a comment here or get in touch via my LinkedIn.