70% of the workforce will telecommute by 2025! 5 key factors to make this transition smoother
Anything that we can do on a computer, can be done from anywhere! Thus, while the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic may have adversely affected several sectors and increased unemployment globally, it hasn’t affected the IT sector as much. In fact, it offers several benefits to employers as well as employees at offshore development firms and presents new opportunities to offshore staffing companies and offshore staffing solutions.
From the employer’s perspective, it saves infrastructural costs, improves the overall organizational productivity, reduces absenteeism, and provides opportunities to break geographical boundaries and access a wider talent pool. On the other hand, employees are reaping several benefits too. These include higher flexibility, elimination of the need to commute, better work-life balance, and others.
Offshore development companies, which offered work-from-home to their employees as a perk, had to adopt this practice as the new normal. We see the trend continuing in 2021, and by 2025, it has been estimated 70% of the workforce will telecommute. Here are 5 ways to make this transition smoother for you and your employees.
- Understand your employees’ needs
Whether you are setting up an offshore development center or availing offshore development services of a business partner such as Braves Technologies based overseas, the most important aspect here is to gauge the expectations of your workforce. Having a clear idea at the beginning will make implementation easier and more effective.
Apart from providing employees with laptops and other digital equipment, you may have to consider covering additional costs, including any furniture that they may require to set up an office at home. Before going ahead, you should discuss these requirements with key stakeholders as well as employees at your organization.
Similarly, it also becomes crucial to convey organizational expectations as a software development company to employees promptly. This will aid in avoiding chaos when it comes to remote execution.
- Invest in collaboration tools
There is a wide array of communication & collaboration tools available for development teams to collaborate. You will have to find the ones that suit your offshore software development company’s exact needs and invest in them.
While telecommuting, do not add or change too many new tools in your toolkit. By doing this, you may run the risk of dispersing communication and losing operational efficiency.
Another crucial parameter that you should not ignore is documentation. Having everything well documented will make life easy for you and your clients. For organizations where documentation is put in the backseat, this transformation may seem a bit daunting.
- Enable more employee engagement
In a collocated office, encouraging a positive attitude and strong relationships is much easier. However, while telecommuting, the employer as well as the employees will need to put in efforts to amplify their engagement with teams virtually.
In most offshore development companies, employees usually collaborate using chat rooms, telephones, and email. This makes engagement more challenging for them.
Appreciating professional achievements, actively participating in virtual meetings & events, and keeping enthusiasm high will put you in the driver’s seat, further ensuring that your employees stand out as leaders while they telecommute.
- Redefine performance metrics
Remote work & telecommuting have given rise to the need for new performance metrics in offshore IT companies. Organizations will have to focus on how much work is done instead of the number of hours put in.
It has further instilled the need for tools and software programs to help manage remote employee performance more efficiently. It may even become essential to build remote leadership to oversee collaboration and ensure operational efficiencies.
Another great way to ensure a high employee performance at your offshore software development company is making performance reviews continuous rather than annual.
- Fortify cybersecurity
As a majority of your workforce will telecommute, ensuring foolproof cybersecurity will become even more vital. Thus, defining security standards and securing data access for your offshore development firm will become more crucial than before.
Organizations will have to invest in cybersecurity to protect workers’ equipment and data. This will require offshore development companies to adopt an altogether different approach from collocated workspaces. Going remote or telecommuting is not hard or complicated for offshore development firms; it’s just different. To ensure that it works for your organization, you will have to analyze various work aspects and make changes whenever required. For most companies, telecommuting will also imply reinventing several organizational policies. Moreover, we work in a global workplace now, and whether you want to go fully remote or follow a hybrid remote model will depend solely on what works best for you!
