How Lockdown has Changed Working from Home: Part I
First a quiz question: Who is, arguably, the most famous person in the UK that works from home?
(Answer at the end of next week’s blog. So no cheating.)
Working from home has gone in and out of fashion with all shapes and sizes of organisations. Many competing factors make it a difficult decision to make at the best of times, which is why the same companies flip in and out of love with homeworking.
In 2009 IBM announced proudly that 40% of their employees were homeworkers. By 2017, they had almost completely changed their minds.
I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme on the subject of working from home (WFH). It begun with a clip of a fellow French national, telling the interviewer that on day one of WFH lockdown (sounds like an American wrestling extravaganza), she caught her son eating Play-Doh and managed to trap her daughter’s finger in the door. She and her husband work full time, and both work occasionally from home and enjoy the balance of busy office life and peace and quiet at home when the children are at school/nursery.
Everything changed a few weeks ago. No-one could have envisaged spring 2020 being quite like this. I can relate to the French couple’s frustrations as my wife and I both work and now we’re trying to do that AND look after our two young children. It’s not easy I must admit - but my Aikido is keeping me sane – that and running Cledor from my spare room.
I learned from the Radio 4 programme that before the lockdown, 15% of the UK workforce were regularly working from home and I suspect the figure would be much higher if only office workers were counted. Clearly, fast broadband and in-the-cloud software makes that possible – which makes it all the more surprising that IBM, a technology company – couldn’t make it work for them.
This got me thinking about working from home in the sector that Cledor operates in most of the time: Property Management - and how the sector will change from this enforced and prolonged period of isolation.
Over the next week I’ll share my thoughts on the pros and cons of working from home. This week we’ll primarily be looking at the implications of homeworking staff on our businesses; next week we’ll focus more on how working from home affect employees.
Outgoings
This is an obvious point but worth making for completeness. I run a business and have a responsibility to keep the income coming in and to be prudent with the costs. A significant overhead for businesses is premises: rent, rates, service charge and insurance, so if companies are able to reduce the amount of office space they rent, they could make huge savings and increase their profit margins – something which many managing agents struggle to do. The more property management staff working from home, the fewer desks needed in the office and hey presto, significantly lower office costs.
From an employee’s perspective, working from home could mean a drop in commuting costs equating to a significant pay rise! If a property manager is paying £4000 for a train/tube season ticket to reach London from deepest Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent or Surrey, they would had to have earned between £6000 and £7000 depending if they are a lower or higher rate income taxpayer, just to pay to get to work! A property manager earning £40,000 will effectively receive an increase in pay of about £6000 – at the same time as the employer is saving a fortunate by renting smaller office space.
Homeworking purely from a financial point of view makes perfect sense for both the employer and employee.
‘Working’ from home
Lockdown means employers ought to have a growing file of evidence that shows them just how well (and how hard) their employees are working at home. The long-held perception that employees are watching too much daytime TV is backed-up by millions of memes like this one.
If employers use this prolonged period of home working to substantiate how well their staff are working from home – through performance measurement, feedback from clients, line manager appraisals, feedback from the employees themselves – then they are far less likely to think their staff are taking it easy on the couch. Once the trust is there, less monitoring would be required. The concept of doing a good job outside of the gaze of the employer is no longer an alien one.
Environmental
I suspect Greta Thunberg will be delighted to see fewer vehicles on the road, pumping out far less pollution. An increase in homeworking will mean cleaner air, less congested roads, less overcrowding on public transport and shorter commuting times. More people working from home means a healthier and less stressful existence for those who need to work in an office, shop, bus or factory. Anyone that continues will commute, will have a more pleasant experience – employers and employees alike.
The right technological tools for the job
IT support departments have been busier than normal. Companies have had to provide their staff with laptops and peripherals and make sure all is working as it should – or convince employees to use their own equipment!
Thank goodness for more effective versions of these guys.
Whilst hardware is easy to come by, adopting new software to enable a more connected remote workforce, is usually a longer-term decision, so companies that have already invested in portals like Dwellant’s are ahead of the game. Given the best property management software seems to be in the cloud and integrates through APIs with the likes of Qube, Propman, Tramps and even Xero these days, perhaps it’s not such a convoluted or difficult decision. I’ve started to look into Monday.com so if anyone uses it, please let me know your thoughts.
I must admit that I have been more amused than I should have been by Zoom video call memes, jokes and mishaps. Make sure you don’t google ‘Jennifer Zoom call’. Whether it’s Teams, Hangouts, Zoom or a host of other video conferencing options that have been around for a long time, the use of them daily has helped to bring people together more effectively as a collaborative group.
Now that this investment has been made in hardware (and software), employers are more likely to want to get the most out of them, so I suspect we will see more homeworking simply because the workforce is technologically geared up to do it.
Thoughts? Find us on social media and share them with us there!
See you next week for part II
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Whether it’s residential leasehold, build-to-rent (BTR) or commercial, Cledor provides on-site staff for landlords and managing agents.
Nick Regnier, Cledor Founder and Managing Director