In the past, many companies offered some employees the opportunity to work remotely, while others insisted that their entire team work in-house at a centralized office. With the introduction of COVID-19, companies were forced to reassess the structure of their teams, and many are now benefiting from important lessons in flexibility, due diligence, milestones and charting.
Among the many interesting findings that may benefit your business for years to come, perhaps the single greatest lesson is that just because “we have always done it this way,” does not mean we should continue doing something the same way. Familiarity and continuity are important for workflow, but they definitely need to give way when innovation and improvement are possible.
If a team member is assigned a task, it should come with clearly defined metrics of what is expected and when.
New Technologies Require New Ways of Thinking
The basic paradigm of “office employment” has been around for centuries, dating back to times before electricity was available, when carrier pigeon or couriers on horseback delivered messages. Clinging to those standards now, living in a time where everyone is always online and reachable by mobile phone, video call, email or even virtual workspaces, in some cases, is shortsighted at best.
It always comes as a surprise when people say that they would never let their employees work from home, especially when the company they work for is a digital tech firm whose entire operation exists online. Whether a programmer writes lines of code in a cubicle or on a laptop in his living room, has no bearing on their value to the company. What does matter is how much code they write, and how well they write it.
Milestones and Metrics Matter Even More
In past decades, management worried that if people worked from home, their productivity would suffer. As it turns out, when a company makes use of clear milestones and easily trackable metrics the productivity of most workers actually improves.
Many business owners already know what the world is just now discovering. For the most part, entrepreneurs are forward-thinking, succeeding in the digital age by adapting daily to new market trends and relying heavily on factual data to make decisions. If a team member is assigned a task, it should come with clearly defined metrics of what is expected and when. Tracking these metrics is as easy as tracking internet traffic, or tangible products in a warehouse.
Measuring when tasks are completed and how long they took is interpreted as quantity. Whether an employee or department exceeds expectations in a bullpen within an office building, or a sofa in a sitting room, is entirely up to them. A job well done is easily recognizable and should be the primary focus of any business.
The World is Changing Quickly and So Are the Demographics
As an increasing number of jobs become possible from home, people have already started to adapt their lifestyles for this new way of working. Many are choosing to move out of large, densely populated cities to more rural destinations. Lower cost of living, less proximity to others in times of pandemic, better air quality and other important quality of life improvements are no longer things that you list wishfully on a pros and cons tabulation of whether you want to take a certain job or not, because they don’t have to be weighed against a lower availability of lucrative positions at work.
Any location with a strong broadband signal, a computer terminal and cell phone service is essentially the same when it comes to performing countless kinds of jobs. True, you can’t work in retail from home quite yet, but if you are an underwriter, credit manager, programmer or any one of thousands of other career choices, you can do your job just as well from almost anywhere you prefer.
The Savings for Businesses Are Massive
As just one example, Twitter announced employees working from home are welcome to do so on a permanent basis if they prefer. That move has massive implications for the tech world, where large companies routinely compete over the same talent pool of potential hires.
“Do I take a job where I have to commute an hour in traffic every day, each way, in a big city, or do I take a very similar job at another company where I can work just as hard from home in my den and get an extra three or four hours a day with my kids?” you might ask.
That draw seems to be even more important than maxing out wages for some workers. Add in the fact that you don't need to lease nearly as much office space, your insurance costs drop considerably, company cars become less necessary and so many other expenses wither away as your new at-home team members voluntarily contribute to their own expenses and indirectly improve your bottom line for you.
The Bottom Line is Simple
Working from home isn’t for everyone, but it’s fair to say absolutely nothing will ever be “for everyone.” The important thing to remember is that just because you haven’t allowed work from home, or always had a policy against outsourcing or never thought remote workers were a good idea in the past, doesn’t mean they aren’t now … and the idea should be objectively considered on its own merits now.
Sometimes, improving your company, increasing earnings and enjoying your life can all be accomplished by accepting that a new fact has changed the old equation enough to yield a different result. At our company, we are relentless in our pursuit of improvement, creating greater efficiency and productivity for our own team and our clients. We have experience with managing a significant in-house and external team of very talented people and we make ourselves available to answer any questions clients may have about operations, or the many ways we can help them earn more from their own operations as well, even if we are all doing so remotely, from the comfort of our homes!
Jonathan Corona has 15 years of experience in the electronic payments industry. As MobiusPay’s EVP, Corona is primarily responsible for day-to-day operations as well as reviewing and advising merchants on a multitude of compliance standards set forth by the card associations. MobiusPay specializes in merchant accounts in the U.S., EU and Asia. Follow them @MobiusPay on Twitter, Facebook and IG.