“ESTABLISH A PRE-WORK ROUTINE AND AN AFTER- WORK ROUTINE. WORKING IN THE SAME PLACE WHERE YOU WAKE UP, EAT, AND SLEEP CAN MAKE ANYONE GO CRAZY WITHOUT PROPER BOUNDARIES IN PLACE” For the employers, it is pertinent to keep motivating employees through regular communications and feedbacks. They will need to invest in the required digital tools to keep not only the communications going, but tools that would help their employees perform their tasks better. There will need to revise their HR policies to place focus on work-life-balance, to consider a permanently flexible working culture, and to ensure the network developed is one that allows their employees to stay connected and productive at the same time, as well as ensuring a seamless, secure and consistent solution for this. The reset button on the future of work has been triggered Reinventing the employment wheel for every organisation to include work flexibility for its staff. As a Deloitte report calls it, it is about creating an elastic workplace. It is not a one size which fits all. The HRmanagement needs to consider the nature of their business and build in this benefit or new ways of doing business into their HR policies. As an example, the new normal for supermarkets does not include working from home as they need to serve customers physically, therefore, their new guidelines called the ‘Guide for Supermarkets to standardise Covid-19 prevention’ centre on training and retraining of staff on the new routines at the supermarket premises.
Social distancing has now become one of our mantras and will become a lifestyle post Covid-19. As such, work from home will most likely be part and parcel of our working culture even after the movement control order is lifted, and a certain percentage of the work will be allowed to be carried out remotely. This will not be applicable to all sectors of course, such as retail and healthcare. Technology advancements make way for remote monitoring or communications, and where robots are in a position to replace those jobs which would normally require human physical involvement or intervention. There certainly are work functions that can be performed at home, with a stable high-speed internet connectivity. According to Barry Vorster, head of technology and culture practices for human resources at PwC, people generally will discover that they do not need to be physically in the office buildings to accomplish certain tasks, but of course this does not apply to all sectors. As individuals we need to adjust quickly to working away from the office and, working from home instead as this will most likely become our lifestyle although not five days a week. For the management, clear rules and guidelines need to be in place on the eligibility towork fromhome, for example, splitting the team into sub teams and alternating physically coming to work, and those who live beyond a certain parameter of the office can work from home a certain number of days in a week. Not all employees, like working from home so there should be flexibility on this, plus if everyone works from home, many office buildings will be redundant. The policy makers will need to revise their policies to guide companies on the implementation of working from home practices or standard operating procedures (SOPs). There are already organisations rethinking their cost structures, business strategies and work procedures. Where working procedures are concerned, striking the right balance between organisational expectations and employee productivity is key. As suggested by Cisco in its ‘A Guide to Teleworking Technologies, it is a multi-dimensional challenge as shown in the figure below:
MARISSA OWENS, OPPORTUNITY BUSINESS LOANS
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Malaysian Technology Strategic Outlook 2019/2020 Intergration of High Technology
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