Pandemic planning - remote working

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Pandemic planning - remote working

Smart Working Revolution

Pandemic Plan for Remote Working CHECKLIST No doubt, many of us will be dusting off our pandemic contingency plan files, right now and remote working is bound to form a part of robust and flexible business continuity arrangements to ensure that the impact of any disruptions will be minimal.

Many organisations have already adopted precautionary measures to reduce risk of infection.

These include, developing policies that encourage ill employees to stay at home without any fear of reprisals and the discontinuation of unessential travel to locations with high illness transmission rates.

We should also consider practices to minimise face to face contact between employees – such as tele-conferencing and remote working.

In our experience, merely issuing your people with a laptop and smart phone doesn’t work.

It leads to confusion and your best laid plans will fail. To reduce disruption and confusion, it is crucial that Operational Leaders and HR can disseminate information about your pandemic preparedness to the workforce and senior leadership.

With this in mind, we’ve put together the following checklist of interventions that will help any required remote working operate more effectively:

1. TECHNOLOGY

Run an immediate audit with your IT team to ensure that they make any necessary tweaks in advance to technology to ensure that your people can work remotely with ease and effectiveness when required. Take a look at how easy it is to connect and collaborate remotely through email, teleconference and with your inhouse systems.

2. MANAGING REMOTE WORKERS

Many of your Leaders will not have managed teams who work remotely. Therefore, quickly put in place a workshop to deliver the basic skills of leading remote or distributed teams is essential. Managing remote teams is very different to managing traditional office based teams. They’ll need to know how to get the best from people, run effective tele-conferences and maintain performance.

It's an art and training Leaders upfront is the most important investment you will make in ensuring continuity of your business during a pandemic.

3. ESTABLISH A REMOTE WORKING POLICY

If you haven’t already got one in place, then a policy that outlines expectations and guidelines is a really good idea.

4. EDUCATE REMOTE TEAMS

Run workouts with teams in advance to set expectations, agree guidelines and help them maintain service and performance while away from the office. This way, team members quickly become acclimatised to new work practices and, as a result, trust builds more effectively too.

5. PILOT REMOTE WORKING IN ADVANCE

Run a test with a pilot group to ensure your plans work well. This gives you the opportunity to sort out any issues, technology or people wise, in advance..

In the event of an influenza pandemic, businesses will have a key role to play in reducing the risk to employee’s health and safety as far as possible, as well as maintaining essential operations.

Remote working will be an essential part of this commitment.

This checklist is not exhaustive. It is a guide to help you start thinking about what you may need to plan for in the event that your people need to work remotely during a pandemic event Shout up if you need further assistance.

We have 20 Years of experience in delivering many types of smart working, including remote working into Organisations similar to yours. We recognise the questions and uncertainty the subject of non-office based roles raises for businesses.

This is why, over the years, we have developed powerful strategies that open mindsets toward adoption of flexible working which we are happy to share with you.

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