Recently, going remote has been a necessity for many of us that are not in essential jobs.  While there has been a gradual awareness and movement towards a more remote environment in the past 5 years, the pandemic has accelerated the transition to a mass migration. Once this crisis has passed, your organization may choose to remain as least partially remote. This will require you to closely examine not only the opportunities this brings, but also the challenges that need to be considered.  

Remote work has perks that have been documented like increased work productivity, more flexible work hours, and improved work life balance to name a few. Remote options allow people to work from anywhere.  This means you can hire someone that isn’t in your local area, or even your hemisphere, depending on your industry. The talent pool becomes an ocean of qualified candidates, just by eliminating the requirement a new hire must relocate, as well as saving time and money.  

I know, sounds exciting – but it takes a lot of consideration and planning to put this in place. Employment laws, regulations, and benefits will vary by state and by country. Outside of compliance, there are many other questions to consider:  

• What’s our new recruitment strategy? 
• How will we need to change our employee engagement processes? 
• Do we reallocate our budget monies? Taking Taco Tuesday, Beer 30, and paintballing fees and applying to something else?  
• What will be remote office/home office functionality needs?   

Not to cause additional stress but… check out Google, they are giving all employees each $1,000 towards creating more workable home offices.  You know all of your employees have googled about Google, right? Eek!  Not sure that’s a budget number many organizations can afford.  

Besides, do you really want to copy another employer or do you want to create something unique for your organization? Don’t think in a vacuum; solicit ideas from employees for ways in which the food and entertainment budget can be repurposed elsewhere. Many employees rightly have concerns about getting sick, being out of a job and/or needing mental and emotional support. Including employees in the conversation will lead to greater engagement now and in the future, which is a very nice outcome.   

If you are going remote, staying remote, or hybrid, now is a great time to figure out what this really means when finding and keeping talented employees whose needs will vary. There won’t be a one size fits all solution to how you recruit and motivate because circumstances will be different. Ask yourselves: Is our remote policy fair and equitable to everyone?   

Remote work is full of both opportunities and complexity and not a simple endeavor. Those that have gone remote due to the pandemic, you realize that some of this process was easy and some not so much.     

We have only just begun to experience and understand the transformation of our work lives during this time. We will be blogging more about remote work in the next few months, including our next one in this series on employee engagement.