How to Facilitate Home Office with a Digital Workplace?

Milton Herman

6 minute read

Home Office: an emerging trend

Many of us have noticed policy changes inside our work environment. Employees are provided with more flexible schedules or allowed to work in an alternative location, among other conditions to diversify work options. These changes originate from digital and technological developments, as well as shifting social perceptions and individual working preferences.

The option to work remotely from your home or another location is a popular emerging trend in start-ups. However, some enterprise companies, like PSA Peugeot Citroen and BNP Paribas, are also looking to improve working conditions for their employees, by implementing policies that allow remote work.

According to Statista, 57% of French business people work remotely at least 2.5 days per week. This is a little bit over the Global Average of 54.3% and USA’s show of 52.6% – in all cases, over half of the working population.

This shift towards Home Office has been beneficial for employees in many ways:

55% Reduction in commute time between home and workplace
31% Reduction in stress
19% Increased work efficiency
25% Increased work autonomy
44% Better balance between personal and professional life

Home Office is eco-friendly!

We should also mention that the total benefits go beyond those of employees!

The most common means of transportation for workers is by car. In France, 73.1% of people use cars to reach their office. It’s easy to imagine the number of harmful emissions a person produces each day, just to reach work. Working from home some days not only saves you time, but it also helps reduce your carbon footprint.

The Potential of a Hybrid Work Model

This white paper featuring research from McKinsey, ADP Research Institute, Microsoft and more.

Overcoming Home Office Challenges with a Social Intranet

Finding Information

Organizing, sharing files and documents can be difficult even when employees work in the same office, so imagine the number of emails and subsequent frustration remote workers must contend with!

Original research from IDC shows that some employees can spend as much as a fifth of their working time searching for information. Much of those wasted hours are spent trawling through emails, browsing sprawling file directories or asking time-pressured colleagues questions.

That is why a great solution is optimizing the company’s intranet to find and add all documents inside a centralized directory. When all documents are made available in the cloud, everyone can find them easily, sometimes just by typing a keyword.

Connecting and Collaborating

Good communication without noise is essential for every team, especially when working with people in different locations.

The intranet can offer many tools that will facilitate communication, like chats or in-doc comments. This will prevent a lengthy and confusing email flow, so you save only the most important information.

Another great feature is the possibility to create your own communities within the intranet. This serves for overall project management as well as information relevancy and confidentiality.

Mobility

Having access to all company information from your mobile device is of paramount importance when people work remotely.

Data from Statista tells us that 85% of workers in the United States use mobile to check their emails. Employees also use other mobile and workplace applications to send real-time messages, store or share information and of course follow social media updates. At the same time, there is a lack of interaction with applications that allow collaboration, training and personal development capabilities.

To help fill in this gap, companies need to make their intranet available on mobile devices. Remote employees can to stay up-to-date with all the information, get notifications for tasks or reminders for meetings, even if they are away from their computer. If your mobile application provides the same connectivity and collaboration as the desktop version, your intranet’s adoption will considerably speed up!

If you are an employee or an enterprise decider who is considering remote work, you now know that a well-integrated mobile intranet can help you manage the work day from any location.

The Potential of a Hybrid Work Model

This white paper featuring research from McKinsey, ADP Research Institute, Microsoft and more.

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