This is a material produced by Lumiun Tecnologia to share some of our practical experiences and research on the current scenario of home office work and also the numerous technology and behavior tools that can facilitate the transition from face -to -face work to the remote in many companies in Brazil.
Benefits, challenges and solutions are the main objectives of this material in order to help employees, managers and entrepreneurs who already work or intend to implement the remote work of part or the whole team.
It is important to keep in mind that this work model is settling as a new standard and is already widely used outside Brazil. Here, it is still in the middle of construction and adaptation, but we hope that we can somehow help the largest number of people with this material.
summary
- Reasons to adopt the home office
- Home Office Challenges
- Legal issues
- How to adjust my company?
- Tools and technologies that can help
- Home office equipment tips
- Conclusion
Reasons to adopt the home office
The remote work model will be increasingly present in the daily life of companies. The cities changed their processes, professional activities have had numerous adjustments and the use of technology has changed a lot over this period. The biggest fear of professionals in relation to home office is certainly the transition from this process and adaptation. According to the Ise Business School research
The future of work is now: over 80% of national companies have enjoyed the teleworking mode.
For over 80% of respondents, the main difficulties have been overcome.
For almost 90% of executives, the moment contributed to reinforce personal values and family ties.
"Changes that would occur in five or ten years are already happening," said Cesar Bullara, director and professor at ISE's People Management Department.
There are several good reasons to adopt this work model, then list the most relevant.
Economy
Following the market trend of creating rotating offices, imagine that your company has 100 employees working in an office, using all the necessary resources for full job. Well, now imagine that 75 of them start working remotely twice a week. This means that you could save at least 30% in space rental (if it is your case), energy, furniture and so on.
Productivity
On average, people who are in remote work usually produce more, when, of course, they have a favorable and controlled environment (we'll talk more about it) to perform their work concretely.
Hiring and retention
Being able to hire talent remotely is an easier task than in the normal working model. If that professional you want to hire to take off with your business sales, for example, live in another state or a municipality far from your business, you may accept your offer at this time. In addition, the probability of loss of this employee decreases greatly by the scenario favorable to him.
Time
People who work at home do not come late, suffer less from stress and pollution from large cities, are less tired or sick, due to the discard of the need for travel to work and all processes involving this task, which was once daily and may no longer exist. Seeing this, your business can earn more productivity, time to use and decrease unforeseen events and delays.
Home Office Challenges
The first step is to change your “normal” work perception. There are several surveys from large companies and health professionals identifying that the pandemic will not have an “end”. The entire population should take care and maintain containment systems for a long time, and this means that remote work will also be alive for a long time.
Next, we listed some of the main challenges for companies in the implementation of home office work.
EQUIPMENT AND CHANGES
Making the transition to remote work is a big change and for that, you need to invest in solutions, services and products. We can say that it is not a high investment compared to any other corporate change, but there is, of course. The important thing is that the deployment occurs quickly, structured and safely, so the return will be as fast as.
Checking companies and partners who joined this modality, we realize that the main investment sites for this change are:
Mobile equipment for employees such as mobile phones and notebooks
stationery and individual daily use, where they were previously used together
tables, chairs and peripherals of computer and computerized systems
There are some extreme cases where there is a need to install high -speed internet, or improvement in equipment related to it, such as routers for example.
However, there are also cases that there is no need to acquire new equipment, as the employee has, or those of the company can be transported for home use by the employee.
FOCUS AND CONTROL OF EMPLOYEES
It is natural in the early days not to be sure about the real effectiveness of employees' work in home office. Managing working activities and hours is a necessary and worrying task, after all, “being at home” may seem tempting to the undoed employees.
Adaptation to the new system
Every change requires learning. Especially processes, where work followed a long period flow. Therefore, in the early days it is normal to generate a small drop in performance and productivity, but if the change project is well structured and concise, this learning curve becomes small and in the first month it can generate great results.
Habits and distractions
People often keep habits and create new ones in some scenarios. Do not think that in your homes such habits will be lost, or that new ones will not be created. It is important that so that they do not run distractions from such habits, that managers or guardians bet on daily communication and training to sensitize people and make the process more transparent, after all, even at home, it is still work.
Technology
In the age of knowledge, without communication the remote work becomes practically impossible. Keep in mind that you need resources that make these two points viable safely and stablely. For this process to become much easier, we have separated some of the major technological and knowledge solutions divided into topics that you can see below.
Legal issues
In order to protect workers' rights, companies must use as a legal basis for what is foreseen in the consolidation of labor laws (CLT). In its articles 2 and 8, respectively, the law determines that the risk of the business belongs to the employer and that any decision must be made respecting public interests over class or private interests. In addition, in the absence of sufficient legal provisions, authorities make decisions.
This means that it is your responsibility, as a company, to ensure business survival even in socially or economically unfavorable circumstances.
Current legal bases
The scenario changed in 2017 with the entry into force of the Labor Reform, through Law 13,467 , which modified and added situations that were not ruled by the CLT. Now there is a chapter specially focused on providing services under a remote work, from Article 75-A of Consolidation.
Already in February 2020, the Federal Government sanctioned Law 13,979 , which provides for measures to confront the world's coronavirus' outbreak - declared pandemic only on March 11. Regulation deals with the need for isolation, quarantine and determination of compulsory examination of examinations, cases in which the absence of the employee should be considered justified lack.
The Concept of Telework
When it comes to remote work and legislation, labor reform calls the home office home office. This modality is framed the service provided outside the company's premises, which uses technological tools and whose nature is not characterized as external work.
How to adjust my company?
The organization must transform the activity: from face -to -face to teleworking. For this, the legislation basically determines that there must be an additive to the employment contract.
ADDITIVE WORK AGREEMENT
The additive term of the employee's employment contract must be prepared in writing, indicate the change in the face -to -face regime for teleworking and describe the characteristics and rules of the sport. Among other issues, it should be clarified how the work will work, as well as will be quantified by minimum tasks delivered per day or and will be subject to journey control, for example.
We provide a document model of the Addendum to the employment contract for teleworking regime - Home Office .
Journey Control
At first, it is understood that, on teleworking, the employee can act at the time he deems appropriate, provided he produces and delivered the tasks determined in the contract. In this case, he would also not be entitled to lunch or interval, night additional (if working at dawn) or overtime.
On the other hand, with new technologies, there are already understandings that it is fully possible to control the journey even at a distance, such as cellular point, registration in the company's internal system and the webcam itself. Hence the importance of thoroughly establishing the rules, as the legislation treats the subject in a generic way.
Source: Great Place to Work
Tools and technologies that can help
Technology does not expect companies to get used to it. Those who adopt first will be pioneers and those who leave aside will lose market more and more, little by little.
To facilitate the process of transition from face -to -face work to home office, there are several tools that technology can help, so we list the most common and indispensable.
Fast and without falls
It will be inevitable to use the internet at work at home office. Therefore, hire a fast and fluid internet, without falls, extremely necessary for full remote work.
Imagine, in the middle of a meeting with an important customer, or a hiring negotiation, there is an internet drop, or partial loss of audio in the video conferencing? Somewhat undesirable and harmful to business, isn't it?
If employees need to download or send files daily, use programs that require good speed, it is recommended to use a fiber optic technology internet that makes the connection more stable.
To improve the speed of connection, we have listed some tips in an article on our blog, which you can access whenever you want.
Data safety and equipment health
People, unlike software, are not programmable and need constant training so as not to compromise the entire system. It is normal to see employees suffering phishing attacks and virus infection on the company's computers, causing slow equipment and network.
When the scenario is remote, safety failures intensify, because in remote access, the unprotected connection is an easy target of hackers. Therefore, maintaining secure security and remote connection systems is critical to not having data losses and revenues arising from attacks.
Listed below, some of the best solutions to maintain the company's data security through antivirus and antimalware for personal computers, according to Av Test :
🛡 - Kaspersky Internet Security
🛡 - A Vira Antivirus Pro
🛡 - Bitdefender Internet Security
🛡 - Avast Free Antivirus
🛡 - McAfee Total Protection
VPN for companies
Most likely there are files and tools that can only be stored and run on the company's internal network. For home office employees to access this data safely and fully controlled, a tool that can be considered ideal for this task is VPN business. We talked more about the topic in an article on our blog, there you will see more detailed information about the tool.
Briefly, it is a network technology that uses the internet to connect a group of computers and maintain the security of the data that travel between them.
In a common scenario, when you connect to the internet and browse websites, download materials and send documents by email, your device is identified through the IP number, and much of your data (excluding the most sensitive) they travel openly and can be intercepted by providers or malicious software. With a private network, data is encrypted, the user is protected and cannot be easily identified.
This technology is used by people who want to maintain navigation privacy and access restricted content in the country. But companies around the world are finding out how to take advantage of VPN to increase the safety of their data and remote work, where many of them do access to the remote desktop of a computer located on the company's internal network, even talked about it in an article on our blog.
Below, see some VPN solutions for companies:
🏠 - Nordvpn
🏠 - ExpressvPN
🏠 - Perimeter 81
🏠 - VPN Business of Lumun
You can see the characteristics of each solution by accessing our IT guide to small and medium businesses .
Video conference
Videoconference at remote work is essential to “shorten” the distance between the employee and the company as a whole.
For complex tasks and processes, only reading can confuse the employee and the worst scenario, the task is performed the wrong way for lack of understanding.
Therefore, it is important to hold conference alignment meetings.
To help professionals, we list the best video conferencing tools:
🎥 - Cisco Webex
🎥 - Google Meet
🎥 - Gotomeeting
🎥 - Join.me
🎥 - Microsoft Teams
🎥 - Skype
🎥 - Zoom Meetings
You can see more information about each tool in our IT guide for small and medium businesses .
Tasks and Processes
Organize the day, take care of personal obligations, know exactly what needs to be done at work.
Maintaining focus is one of the most challenging attitudes by home officers, taking into account the workplace full of temptations and distractions.
For the relief of managers, there are several tools available on the market, some for free, to manage employees and processes of employees:
🎯 - Trello
🎯 - Proofhub
🎯 - Quire
🎯 - Asana
🎯 - Microsoft to
🎯 - basecamp
🎯 - Monday.com
🎯 - runrun.it
🎯 - Pipefy
If you want to know more information about each solution, go to our IT guide for small and medium businesses .
Avoid distractions on the Internet
There are market solutions that offer complementary internet access control resources. Such a tool optimizes data security through fully customizable access barriers.
Doing internet access control in companies is a solution that has become commonplace, especially for home office employees, where tasks control is somewhat more complicated to perform.
Next, we list good options for internet access control solutions:
🔔 - DNS FILTER
🔔 - Lumiun Enterprise
🔔 - Nextdns
🔔 - Cisco Umbrella
Home office equipment tips
For greater remote work efficiency it is necessary to be prepared.
On the one hand, the company should know how to manage and organize the team's work. On the other hand, employees must have structure to ensure that activities are done with quality, without compromising productivity or communication with customers, colleagues and superiors.
Next, we listed some key equipment and objects for an efficient home office work.
Computer
Indispensable item, present in 10 out of 10 domestic offices. It may be a table or notebook computer, but give preference to equipment with good storage capacity, agile processor, sound card and video. The equipment must have the specifications necessary for the professional to be able to exercise all their tasks fluidly and without disorders generated for lack of performance for example.
Comfortable chair
To face working hours, a comfortable chair is essential to alleviate possible stresses and maintain the employee's ergonomic stance. Press for comfort and ergonomics and not design at the time of purchase.
Good lighting
To ensure productive work that does not harm health, the tip is to bet on well -lit environments. Natural light, from the window for example, is a great choice, as natural light hits directly in the workplace if it is near the window. For those who do not have natural light, lamps can be a good alternative, illuminating and making the environment more cozy.
Organizers
Leaving the messy atmosphere can generate uncontrolled. Severe errors due to lack of organization are common in messy environments. For this, bet on organizers, they will make life easier for the home office, whether to store papers, pens or files.
Router
Having a good internet signal is crucial to maintaining productivity at remote work. Therefore, it is worth investing in a good router. Look for more current models, compatible with new technologies. This will allow everyone to work in rooms far from the equipment and use the smartphone or other device to do other work that uses the internet without affecting the speed or signal of the internet.
Nobreak
The device protects and keeps the electronic devices in operation in declines of falls or energy oscillation. So no one is in danger of having damaged files or equipment and also having to perform tasks that have been lost again.
Source: Intelbras Blog
Conclusion
With a few years of market experience, developing tools and materials for productivity optimization and improvement of business security systems from the most different segments and sizes, we at Lumun believe that remote work can be an exponential factor of health improvement and billing, if used in an organized and clear way, using good tools as mentioned above.
Working in home office is a change that involves several areas and generates some insecurity like every great change.
If you are intended to implement the remote work, or already implemented but have difficulties, we hope this material has helped in some way.
It is important to keep in mind that this work model is settling as a new standard and is already widely used outside Brazil.
Here it is still in the middle of construction and adaptation, but we hope that we can somehow help as many people with this material.