Businesses that have never had a remote workforce entered unfamiliar territory when states across Australia implemented stay-at-home restrictions. In some cases, employers only had 24 hours to transition.
Now that companies are more comfortable with remote work, employers should evaluate if they’ve been keeping up with compliance procedures and policies.
Recording work hours
Recording the hours worked for remote employees paid hourly may require new procedures. Simply paying for eight hours regardless of time put in may not satisfy record-keeping requirements.
Whether it’s a time clock in the cloud or employees physically keeping track of their time, it’s important to have a mechanism for accurately recording the time worked.
Employers should also realise that the new work-from-home environment requires flexibility.
With children at home, employees have the additional pressures of taking care of family needs while getting their work done. Employers will need to be flexible about performance and understand that the new way of working impacts everyone differently.
Tracking attendance and leave
Without the physical separation of home and work life, salaried and hourly employees may forget to report to their managers when they’re taking time off for sick leave or other purposes.
One strategy is for managers to send friendly reminders to their teams to inform them if they’re sick or absent on a day. Reminders also help managers know when not to expect any work or communication and monitor the lack of performance.
Addressing performance issues
One area that becomes challenging in the remote environment is performance—especially for managers who are used to basing performance on time spent at the office.
If an issue happens, that would traditionally involve calling an employee to the manager’s or HR office, schedule a video meeting. A video meeting gives managers the chance to use facial expressions as clues for potential concerns.
Focusing on safety
Business leaders should also consider what situations they may need to report to Safe Work Australia when employees are working from home.
The cases may become more nuanced. For example, tripping over a dog while walking to the printer may be less likely subject to workers’ compensation.
It’s vital to provide tips to employees on how to ensure a safe workplace—and that if they have an injury while working from home, they still need to report that injury.
Maintaining data privacy
Businesses are documenting more things digitally in the remote environment. Compliance with data privacy laws may be a bigger challenge since HR documents often contain sensitive employee data including, birth dates and payroll banking information.
To maintain data privacy and security, employers need to ensure that those handling sensitive information from home follow best practices. They may include procedures such as:
· Connecting to the company network and applications via a corporate virtual private network (VPN)
· Ensuring the devices and applications are patched and up to date
· Encrypting all data transmission (which means not sending sensitive documents via unencrypted email)
· Maintaining physical safety (such as securing laptops and locking up confidential paperwork)
Training managers
With the prospect of permenant remote working arrangements, businesses should ensure they’ve trained managers on managing their remote teams.
HR professionals could create regular check-ins with managers. HR could schedule weekly conference calls to discuss concerns, challenges and strategies—and encourage managers to reach out when they have questions.
Shifting gears
Considering all the new things that HR professionals are dealing with currently, this is not the time to reinvent the wheel. If your business is ready to work from home - then great. But it would be challenging for some companies to implement changes retroactively. Approach the situation step by step by focusing first on essential business.
Provide opportunities to share successes and potential failures and make an effort to highlight the value of everyone’s continuing support.