It has been almost two years since organizations were forced to shift the way they operate by adopting a remote work strategy. That shift, once just a preferred perk, has now become an essential part of how employees work, and how companies thrive.
In 2019, just 40% of employers offered employees a part-time telecommuting benefit, according to data from the Society for Human Resource Management. Today, 63% of high-revenue growth companies offer a
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“At the beginning of all this, before the pandemic, remote work was really viewed more skeptically by a lot of managers,” says Deb LaMere, chief human resources office at Datasite, a tech provider for the M&A industry. “Managers would wonder if somebody working from home was being productive. But what the pandemic actually did was shine a whole new light on the reality of remote working.”
LaMere recently connected with Employee Benefit News to discuss how remote work has evolved over the past 24 months, how Datasite saw positive results from their own work-from-home policy, and how to keep employees motivated outside of a traditional office environment.
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How has the remote work experience positively impacted Datasite?
We transitioned our entire organization, including our customer support center, and call centers are typically really hard to transition to a remote environment. But we had the tools and infrastructure to be able to take them all home. Our productivity not only increased for our services team, it also increased our net promoter scores, which are customer satisfaction scores. Being able to take our work home and be more productive, and actually increase how our clients feel has just opened our eyes to a whole different world.
What unexpected opportunities would you say remote work has created for employers?
The biggest thing has been hiring, we’re able to cast a wider net now. This has given us an
One downside to remote work is that it can be hard to maintain the kind of camaraderie among colleagues that the physical office provides. How can employers build strong personal connections within their remote teams?
The biggest problems can be keeping people motivated and keeping them connected. As we started to open our offices we had employees who had been colleagues for two years and were just meeting each other in person for the first time. But we were able to keep them connected through all of these different tools and activities that we launched.
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We launched a bonus platform for recognizing employees where managers can give employees points for a job well done and they can convert those points into a gift card for anything they want. It really was a great peer-to-peer recognition tool where everybody globally could see what was going on and who was standing out.
How has technology kept up with the ever evolving needs of the remote workforce?
There's always more that are coming out, and I can't wait to see what comes next. But the tools that we have right now, we are really leveraging them to create greater collaboration amongst the team.
