Businesses should embrace remote working, claims HR expert

Businesses should embrace remote working, claims HR expert

Although many businesses are beginning to offer remote working opportunities to some extent, an HR expert claims that embracing the practice even more fully could benefit companies and staff hugely.

Norma Price, the HR director at headset tech firm Plantronics, has spoken to HR Magazine about the fact that she only asks her team to come into the office on a Monday. ‘Then for the rest of the week they manage their own work-life balance,’ she added. She claims that businesses will enjoy growth, cost savings, fewer losses through illness and stress, together with better retention rates for talented staff, as a result of remote working.

However, this is providing companies take measures to ensure that staff do not feel that they are expected to work all the time when they are at home. She explained that technology such as smartphone, which allow staff to be more mobile than ever, should be ‘liberating’ for workers. They shouldn't, she said, be used as a ‘shackle’ to keep staff working out of hours.

Ms Price’s comments follow the publication of a survey by IT recruitment firm Modis, which found that 66 per cent of remote workers given mobile devices use them outside their agreed working hours. Almost as many use them at the weekends. The survey, which talked to 1,000 UK employees that work flexibly, shows that mobile devices make remote working easier, but can also create problems.

Overall, though, Ms Price insists businesses can gain from investing in the required fast internet connections and managed networks that can make remote working a possibility for as many staff members as possible.

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