While you certainly can’t build pallets or saw lumber from home, with the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ve likely found yourself suddenly needing to allow some employees to work from home. Perhaps you’re the one that must decide how it will be done at your company. Fortunately, remote work, telecommuting, and virtual teams have been around for a while now. It should be fairly easy to get things in place and keep your pallet or lumber business running smoothly during the COVID-19 crisis.
In the past your company may have never implemented or allowed telecommuting or working from home on the assumption that employees would not be as productive. But the fact is there’s plenty of research to indicate that remote workers are productive. A two-year study conducted by Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom showed major increases in productivity with work-from-home employees and a decrease in employee turnover.
So, working from home likely won’t create a productivity disaster. The effectiveness of this strategy depends on the policies you develop and tools that are used. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
• Who should work from home? The obvious candidates are any employees that normally spend most of their time at a desk in front of a computer. These could be management and administrative staff such as accounting, human resources and sales. During the pandemic, you may also want to make special considerations for those over 60 or anyone with serious underlining health risks.
• Time tracking. For employees who are hourly, rather than salary, you might want to consider time tracking. The company or software that provides your time-tracking now may already have the capability of tracking work-from-home employees and you simply need to turn on the feature. If this is not the case, then you can easily sign up for a cloud-based time tracking tool. Most of these products are $5 to $10 a month per employee.
• Remote work technology requirements. If most of your key business applications are cloud-based (meaning you access them via a browser), then you won’t have any difficulty transitioning to work from home. Employees will simply be accessing these applications from home rather than the office. On the other hand, if you have applications that are server-based and reside on your company network, then it will be necessary to implement a Virtual Private Network (VPSN) so employees can access these applications from home. This could be set up by your own IT staff or an outside consultant. A VPN is simply a secure connection to your company network via an encrypted connection over the Internet. But it does take some expertise to set it up properly. You don’t want to risk sending sensitive company and customer data over the Internet unencrypted. VPNs may also be a feature of technology you already own but has never been used, and it simply needs to be turned on and set up correctly.
Another major element of remote work is the technology you use for meetings. Doing test runs can be a great way to ensure everyone knows how to get access when they leave the office. If online meetings are a new thing for you, here are a few products to try.
• Zoom.us – This is one of the most popular ways you can conduct online meetings. Zoom is very user-friendly and has seen explosive growth during COVID-19, going from 10-million users in January to over 200-million users since the pandemic started. It’s free to use for up to 100 participants but meetings will be capped at 40 minutes. Paid versions start at $14.99 per month.
• Google Hangouts or Google Meet – If your company is already a G-Suite shop, then you already own this capability and can simply start using it.
• UberConference.com – This product is free to use for up to 10 participants and is also very user-friendly. Paid versions start at $15 per month.
• Microsoft Teams – A collaboration and online meeting tool for Microsoft 365 users. It offers both free and paid versions and works well for those already accustomed to using Microsoft products. Free version allows for meetings up to 500 users.
Teleworking may have a silver lining for your pallet business. You may see an increase in productivity, find that you can reduce the amount of office space you need and possibly tap into a larger talent pool than was previously available once you have adapted to running your pallet business with a remote workforce. We’ll share more information about the technology and resources for teleworking in our next Idea Box.
