Solutions

Home office: an effective tool to ensure business continuity in the time of home quarantine

The epidemic of the new coronavirus COVID-19 and the related sharp increase in the number of employees in home quarantine makes companies and organisations face brand new challenges. How to ensure the company’s continued operation in this situation? The solution is a controlled set-up of work from home.

At Deloitte, we have a long-term positive experience with the use of home office, and in these challenging times, it helps us efficiently face the situation. To support the operation of home office, we have developed a technological solution that allows flexible responses to the current situation and covers all areas of employee work. This IT tool allows flexible monitoring of the efficiency of work from home even for large teams.

Together with this tool, we offer our expertise to organisations affected by the current wave of quarantines, which can help resolve additional questions related to work from home. What are they?

  1. Identification of processes and roles that can be reallocated to home office, depending on the availability of IT systems, data, and information in electronic form
  2. Addressing labour law aspects including the place of work, occupational health and safety, compensation calculation methodology, etc.
  3. Monitoring and analysis of employee activities, mapping and designing a controlled environment
  4. Solutions for management, communication, and interaction between employees
  5. Analysis of IT system security
  6. Preparation of a BCM strategy, identification of various scenarios for home office use, simulation, and testing

Home office: first a nice benefit, now a necessity

The government measures related to the prevention of the spread of the coronavirus and a global pandemic mean that home office stops being seen as simply a benefit, but instead as a necessity to maintain full operation of the company and its work activities. What advantages does it bring?

Immediate benefits in the current situation:

  • Introducing a functional Business Continuity solution for workers who are or will be quarantined
  • Cost-saving, or “why pay salary compensation to employees who are temporarily unable to work when they can and want to work”
  • Keeping track of whether people spend their working hours with productive activities

Long-term benefits, even after the current situation subsides:

  • An additional benefit for employees (time saving, flexibility, comfort)
  • A larger pool of employees and potential job applicants
  • Cost-saving for the employer
  • Analysis of the room for automation of activities, improving process efficiency

APAT - Home Office Enablement Tool

The coronavirus will test how ready we are for flexibility of work in practice

The coronavirus is spreading across the world and governments are introducing measures intended to minimise the risk of infection and prevent further spread of the virus. However, these measures naturally affect our daily activities, including our professional lives. Along with quarantine ordered as part of prevention, the impossibility of personal contact with clients, cancellations of seminars or other events, the topic of flexibility of work and use of technology for remote communication with teams, clients and business partners takes centre stage. So what should we do to make sure that home office works well? How can technology help us communicate with clients? And how to ensure that companies can still perform their activities, albeit in a restricted regime?