I am one of the many people working from home during the current pandemic. Data released by the ONS in April shows that 49.2% of adults in employment are now working from home as a direct impact of social distancing measures. Whilst my living room table and chair are not particularly ergonomic I count myself lucky to be able to work from home and have the necessary tools to facilitate effective remote work.
The number of workers whose wages are being paid by the government under the furlough scheme is now over 7.5 million. This highlights the importance of investing in technology to allow employees to work remotely wherever possible. Whilst for some industries such as manufacturing or retail it may be impossible for many of their employees to work from home the insurance industry in most cases does not have such constraints. As shown in the graph below the 'Financial and insurance activities' sector has already shown it has the capacity to support employees working from home. Now is the perfect opportunity to push this forward to allow more jobs in the sector to be done remotely.
We are all in this together and anything that an individual company in the industry can do to facilitate business being transacted digitally can benefit the entire sector. Now is the time to act decisively and make positive changes. We need to mitigate the immediate effects of the current crisis but also make ourselves more resilient should we ever face similar circumstances again.
According to a prophetic report from the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) published in 2019 "The chances of a global pandemic are growing. " The world facing another global pandemic according to many experts on the matter is not a matter of if but when.
It's not all bad news, however. Enabling more of your employees to work from home comes with many benefits. The most obvious and immediate financial benefit is the reduced need for often expensive office space. Having a remote workforce also means you can cast a wider net when hunting for talent. For employees, there are also many upsides. I myself save close to 2 hours a day commuting giving me a better work-life balance as well as saving money. In addition for people with families, they could potentially save money on child care and be in the children's lives more.
Now that we have covered why remote working is important and some of the benefits the question becomes what can we do to enable remote working. In an effort to answer this question and help companies face this challenge NTT DATA UK&I is offering two ready-to-run solutions (TŌGŌ and Knowler) which boost productivity and the management of knowledge within your digital workplace.