How to Frame an Ideal Work from Home Policy for your Employees
In today’s digital world where laptops, smartphones, wi-fi devices and many app-based platforms have made every corporate employee work from any part of the globe, work from home policy is accepted broadly by the employers.
It is also very important to design an ideal policy for the employees who work from home so it adds maximum value to the business. A perfect work from the home policy must clarify the roles and responsibility of each remote employee. The policy must also define who is privileged to work from home on and what terms and conditions would be applicable to avail this benefit.
In certain cases like global health epidemic such as COVID-19, it must be mandatory to work from home for the workforce to stay safe, healthy and productive.
Things HR must Include in Company’s Work from Home Policy
Here are the things that your company’s work from the home policy must adhere to.
Eligibility Criteria
The company is run by various functions performed by different teams. It is not possible for every unit to work from home as there are certain duties which can’t be conducted remotely so HR must clarify the eligibility criteria of working from remote locations. However, no eligibility conditions apply in the case of a national epidemic such as COVID-19 as there are greater chances to get infected if moved out from home in such case. You may be interested to learn more about the ways to support the health & well-being of remote employees.
Apply and Approval Procedure
Streamline the process of applying for the remote working policy. Also, clarify the approval process like who would be approving the requests and how much time it would take to get approval to work from remote.
Remote Working Hours
As an HR of the company, you must clearly define the total number of hours that every employee must meet while working from home. Remote employees must also know when to available for the call or conferences required to discuss business-related tasks.
Attendance and Availability Protocol
When employees are working from home, it becomes difficult for HR and business team managers to track the presence of each of them. You cannot ping them online or send them text messages every day to stay updated about their presence. It leads to the need for setting up an attendance protocol to let team managers and HR be informed how and when the remote employees would define their availability on a daily basis.
Channels for Communication
As face to face communication is not possible when the employees work remotely so setting up a common communication channel becomes prominent between the teams. There are various options available for HR to streamline the communication with remote employees such as emails, skype, slack, company intranet or any other software could be subscribed.
Information Security Standards
Cybersecurity is the foremost concern for technology-based organizations as the data and code needs to be confidential and remains within the company premises. For this HR must go for setting up a secure virtual private network for remote-based employees. It will protect their system from the outer digital world. Apart, employees must be instructed to use their work systems while performing work duties rather than using their personal devices.
Feedback from Others
HR of the company must continuously be involved in taking feedbacks from the team managers on the policy to work from home. Since everything can’t be perfect in one time so the opinions from others do matter a lot to strengthening the whole process of remote-working.
Conclusion
Work from home can be a new policy for organizations to adopt so it may require multiple discussions with respective stakeholders. However, after finalizing the initial draft of the policy, your business is supposed to get prepared for adopting new workplace behaviors.
Are you representing a corporate organization and looking for corporate health and well-being programs for your employees to improve their health and productivity at work? Get in touch with our wellness experts.