The coronavirus has forced companies to send their onsite workforce home and has disrupted the status quo massively. They have to take a look at their “work from home” policies and how they can ensure that their workers can be productive in this new set up while being safe.
This is an opportunity for all businesses to learn from the field service industry that has been managing remote workers for a long time. While employees are working remotely, it is important that you can supervise them. You need to also make sure that employees are not working at locations other than their homes that may be less secure. Such data security issues can be best addressed by enforcing location-based access restrictions. This is similar to restrictions placed on accessing critical data outside of designated office areas especially for the healthcare industry.
With new work-from-home policies, similar restrictions can be placed on virtual offices using technologies such as Geofencing. This is of paramount importance for certain industries such as home-health-care where telehealth services are being implemented.
In the field service industry, businesses have been using technology such as Geofencing to know that the remote employee is working in a certain geographic area. If the geofence is defined as within 200 feet of their home address, it will alert businesses when the employee travels outside their home. Using this technology, you can measure the amount of time the employee spent at home during work hours. And after work hours, monitoring can be automatically turned off to respect the employees privacy. With Geofence technology from companies like allGeo, you can feel assured that employees are doing their work remotely at their homes.
In addition to supervision, here are some other ways you can enhance productivity as employees are working remotely:
- Managers can use the ‘myTeam’ feature to remotely monitor all the team members. The feature can also be turned for all the team members to check on the location of their colleagues.
- Collaboration is critical in a remote situation. There are many tools such as Slack, Skype, Google hangouts and Zoom that are available for quick and easy communication as well as setting up video calls.
- Setting tasks for employees and tracking their progress is another way to make sure that the work is getting done. Tools like Jira, Basecamp and Monday.com can help track tasks and projects.
This is the time for businesses to take the right steps to promote their work from home policies. By making smart decisions now, businesses can make sure that the disruption caused by Coronavirus does not impact the productivity of their workforce.
About allGeo
allGeo helps SMBs and Enterprise businesses better manage mobile workforce and field operations with tools such as real-time location, GPS time and attendance, geofence visit logs, Lone worker safety, Mobile forms and more! All the tools can be highly customized to fit each use case. The platform features powerful rules engine and integrates with popular back-end CRM, HRMS, and Payroll systems to automate day-to-day operations.
allGeo serves customers from a wide range of industry including field service management, trade services, emergency responders, sales reps, transportation & logistics, oil & gas, home health care providers. These customers do report improvement in productivity and savings in payroll.
