Does work from home increases productivity or decreases productivity.

In my past life as a CE of an organisation, I was interested in making my staff to work from home. When I suggested it to my management team and later to the HR team, it was met with a lot resistance. My argument was as follows

1. Those who stay too far away from office. They save their time commuting to office. Less pollution to Mother Earth and less stress on the staff. Less medical claims as a total effect.
2. Organisation can use less physical space as not all of them come to office at the same time. 
3. Good employee engagement exercise, which I hope in producing better employee retention.
4. And most importantly I wanted to work from home also, sometimes. 😂

One of the biggest concern they had at that point of time was productivity. How do we measure them and how we are going to reward them later in the year. And most importantly, will the other staff whom are working in office will be able to take it, if those who work from home had a bigger reward compared to those whom are working from office. Being the “Genghis Khan” of that organisation I put my foot down and told my team. I don’t care just do it. Then they came with a brilliant idea on doing a test case. So the HR team selected on department and started to implement the work from home and told me that they will get back to me on the effectiveness in six months time. 

Cut the story short, productivity increased , more customer engagement was done and the staff was happier. Of course there were some increase in the cost, we had to provide laptops, network dongle and some tweaking on the IT system ensuring the secure line.  It was a great success and we were supposed to roll out the plan to all departments but alas. The life altering event happened and all plans went “kaput”

Fast forward to now, the pandemic has caused abrupt disruption in our life’s. Work from home is a new norm and sometimes government insist on it. When I speak to managers and chief executive officers, many of them are baffled on how to implement work from home effectively. One of the international financial related services company asked their staffs to work from home without giving laptops and network access. It took them almost seven months to sort out their laptops and network access. And we complain about Malaysian companies. 😳

What is the  current work from home scenario look like?

1. Nowadays the kids are at home with the work from home parents. In my experiment almost five years ago. The parents worked from home, while the kids were in school and or in baby sitters house. So the parents nowadays are more stressed handling the kids needs all the time that they are suppose to be working.
2. Some managers whom were control freaks (I am not complaining about this as I would love my managers to do that) have turned to Managers from Hell. Calling in a few times in an hour to make sure the staff in actually working and not changing diapers for the kids or their parents. 
3. Question on productivity results and pushing the staffs to be better at productivity  since they are working from home. But you can’t put the entire blame on your managers, because in many unfortunate instances they have bosses like Genghis Khan.  😔 sorry for all those whom was tortured by me. 
4. Most of the managers have no time or do not have a method or means to track productivity on regular basis. 

What do the current managers need to do?

1. Talk to your staff to understand what is their challenges and try to accommodate them. Like laptops, poor network connections. Kids at home.
2. Try to set a mandatory time that they must attend to the office matter and times they can take a breather. 
3. May create a pool system, if one person has to attend to an emergency others can come in to assist until the matter in hand is solved.
4. And get a system to measure the productivity of the staff and also their happiness index, as the management must always monitor their employees mental health all the time.

And that’s the end of my rant today. Thank you reading it. 

#cmvicks #umper #ramssol #cllement #workfromhome #wfm #productivity #manager #genghiskhan #feets #iamanicepersonyouknow  #covid19