The global coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to adopt flexi-working and working from home and, for many, it's here to stay – from choice, not necessity.
While most businesses have enabled people to work productively to ensure their organisations thrive (and not just survive), it is important they also have the technology and security in place to make remote working successful and sustainable long term.
As thousands of businesses have found out, operating remotely has created some unexpectedly positive benefits – more cost efficiencies and increased productivity. Better work balances and more family time has also resulted in happier employees and staff being more present when working.
Some companies have been well ahead of the curve. Media organisation Māori Television began trialling flexi-working with its workforce about three years ago - shortly after relocating from Newmarket to East Tāmaki, long before the first Covid-19 case in Aotearoa.
Tāhuhu Rangapū (Chief Executive) Shane Taurima says Māori Television had a head start on identifying what it needed to change to become a successful flexi-working organisation and subsequently found the lockdown periods less daunting.
Outside lockdowns, approximately one third of Māori Television is working from home at any given time.
"It wasn't something new to us because we have always had to think smarter with limited resources. That gave us a head start but was also a challenge during lockdowns because we don't have the same extensive pool of people to draw upon. In news, for example, core decision makers are still needed on site. Balance is critical," says Taurima.
To keep team members connected, a Kaimahi Facebook page was set up with online karakia at the start of the working day. Māori language lessons continued on video conference. Staff could also win weekly prizes by posting and sharing photos of – for example – their 'Kitchen Kai Creation'. Māori Television also created 'The Pēhea Club', a check-in support system where leaders stayed in regular contact with staff.
A recent survey of its people found free-range working had resulted in overall better work-life balances and happier staff; the wider workforce was more productive as there were fewer typical office distractions.
"In a normal day or setting, we haven't seen any productivity drop off – if anything, it has increased. The key is communication between managers, their teams and a united effort by all of us to do what's needed," says Taurima.
Kate Tulp, head of corporate at Vodafone Business, says it is important that other businesses - big and small - sort out the "emergency sticking plaster" set-up that for many is currently allowing their staff to work remotely.
"When you have no choice in the pandemic but to work from home, that's one thing but, when you say to your employees you can work from anywhere, there are concerns about how to maintain security and efficiency," says Tulp.
In recent years, even before the onset of Covid-19, Vodafone experienced an uptake in businesses implementing tools for free-range working. Last year lockdowns became the turning point – out of necessity.
Tulp says businesses either found the initial lockdowns easy (those already set with free-range working tools for employees and customers) or extremely difficult, as they did not have the technological resources to get into that space at pace.
"We saw a lot of companies deploy a temporary solution – firing out either iPads, laptops or mobile phones. That was what they could do at the time but they certainly didn't have collaboration tools and the applications in the cloud for their people to be able to work effectively," says Tulp.
"What we're seeing now is companies and businesses take a moment to say, 'This needs to be sustainable and it needs to be secure because we now recognise it's a big risk for our business and customers if it's not'."
To become a sustainable and secure free-range working organisation, firms need four crucial things, she says: access to physical tools, access to reliable wifi and mobile coverage, business applications in the cloud (such as accounting packages or customer record and care systems) and stringent cybersecurity systems.
Security is one of the most important priorities if remote or flexi-working within an organisation is to become permanent, says Tulp: "There's still a lot of work to do by organisations to think properly about security - not just about how to keep an attack out but how to know if somebody is [already] inside and what to do about that."
Businesses have done a great job of pivoting to allow working outside the office but now need to think longer term: "Aside from making sure you have the right tools and that they are secure, you need people to feel comfortable working from home. Think about if your people set up right; do they have a great space to work from that's ergonomically sound; do they have the right lighting and seating and do they have a secure space where [others in the home] cannot see confidential customer information?
"Have they got the right wifi and collaboration tools so it is actually a good experience for the employee, instead of a frustrating one?"
Free-range working is the way of the future, she says, a requirement of the modern workplace also applicable to owner-operators who do not typically work from an office.
"Free-range working also allows business owners to do the admin and payments aspects of their job on the go. If it means that they have two more hours a day that is billable, that makes an enormous difference to small business owners and their teams."
To find out more about free-range working with Vodafone see www.vodafone.co.nz/workfreerange.