Shunning remote working a mistake

This week the President asked all public servants to return to work, cancelling all circulars with regard to work-from-home measures and rotation-based work rosters. With the increase in vaccinations, the move was simultaneously expected and understandable, but also worrying.

The concern stems from the lack of understanding that still surrounds the Delta variant, as well as the very real possibility of more, possibly more dangerous, variants emerging in the future. The most prudent long-term strategy would be to lean in to the ‘new normal’.

That said, the desire for work to return to normal, especially in the public sector, is natural. Not least down to the fact that much of the public sector simply isn’t geared towards remote working in the same way the private sector is; long-term staff only familiarised in legacy software, and outdated methods of data-entry, make this particularly difficult.

That said, this pandemic should be looked at as an opportunity to update such systems and processes in the public sector, while the Government should at the same time urge the private sector to continue with remote working wherever possible – even making it a permanent feature.

Indeed, as vaccine deployment increases, more and more work places are demanding that their employees work from office. Workers, though, are resisting, instead demanding the improved work-life balance that many have experienced as a silver lining during the pandemic. Yet, implementing flexible working strategies will be hard on managers, human resources departments and other traditional structures.  While it is tempting to return to pre-COVID living, millions of workers, both within and outside Sri Lanka, could genuinely benefit from a hybrid system. Allowing remote working could be a game changer for the welfare of workers and result in increased productivity and fewer overheads for some companies. It would be a pity to give this up, partly because the infrastructure has already been set up for such a transition to take place.

Unfortunately, one major barrier to this is conventional managers who struggle to evolve themselves and end up preventing change within their departments or organisations. True, a long-term work-from-home environment would mean that managers will have to work harder to communicate and build relationships with their teams, but this is not difficult if technology is utilised. Changing attitudes, however, is hard even with the support of technology. 

If companies and countries are serious about adopting a hybrid model then there are two things that need to be tackled. One, Government policies need to evolve around working from home and how welfare, pensions and other support is provided to employees, which would be challenging across different industries. Secondly, companies need to optimise their policies about remote work and encourage a healthier work environment. This brings a lot of challenges, from providing equipment to deploying communication technology, from accurately logging time to virtual project management, and so on.

Arguably, some of the largest companies in the world are already working towards minimising the hurdles, and facilitating training and learning for their employees, to better adapt to a remote working environment. The same is true for entrepreneurs, startups and small organisations, who already favoured this type of environment because of its clear benefits in scaling growth and acquiring talent from around the world.

A wider adaptation of remote-work culture will further accelerate the demands of the modern global economy and undoubtedly enable organisations to fulfil their requirements more easily than before. This is the long-term incentive companies need to focus on and not become bogged down by conventional attitudes. Sri Lanka, with its comparatively small economy and even smaller private sector, could easily coordinate to create a hybrid work system.