Is Working from Home the Silver Bullet for Operational Resilience?

If COVID has taught us anything about business continuity and resilience, it’s that work from home works reasonably well. Not perfect for all but certainly sustainable for most people.

COVID has changed our sense of dependency on the office. Working from home is now easy and acceptable.

Work from home was not a strategy devised by BC managers or the corporate leadership team. COVID forced us into isolation. What happened next was extraordinary – organisations reduced bureaucracy, amended policy, streamlined processes, went above and beyond and enabled their workforce to work from home. For organisations that traditionally never supported work from home, COVID was a necessary evil that turned to be a blessing in disguise.

Working from home does have its advantages - no travel time, work/home balance, staff are happy, and productivity improved. Does it make the organisation more resilient? I think there’s a yes and no side to this.

On the affirmative, the key benefit is that the organisation operates with more operational redundancy. The loss of the office environment, for any reason, means that people can simply return home and continue to work.

There is dark side to this. I think we lost something due to the work from home strategy. We lost the social side of our work life. We took a mental health hit. The benefits of standing around the ‘water cooler’ or in the kitchen/breakout area and discussing the latest movie, politics, and work should not be underestimated. It’s surprising how much gets done after people bump into each other in the office, or head downstairs together to the local café, or grab a quick bite at the local dumpling restaurant. It is so much better it is to have a quick, in the flesh, face to face than via teams.

It seems to me that COVID has had a negative impact on business continuity strategies. The natural response to the question if you lost your office facility, where could you go? Now nearly always results in work from home.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean, you should! The benefits of using an alternate office environment, especially if its already part of your real estate landscape, are significant. They include social interaction, physical and logical security, OH&S compliant work environment, meeting room and breakout facilities and, of course, water coolers – where most decisions, agreements and collaboration happen.

Work from home is a fantastic strategy for communicable disease. It’s also great for short term isolated loss of facility while preparations are underway to make alternate work facilities available. Business Continuity aims to restore business operations to BAU in an acceptable time frame and I wouldn’t call work from home an example of BAU – and neither should you.