Home Working Challenges

Sooooo – I’m told it’s a bit chilly in Blighty at the moment, a few snowdrops have fallen and the whole country has had to dig out the Horlicks to keep themselves warm.

Or in fact – the UK is having it’s coldest winter for almost 30 years and most of Berkshire is under a foot of snow. Which is quite problematic for WhiteLabelDating.com as most of our staff live within a ten mile radius of Windsor and it’s not the easiest place to get to when you live at the bottom of an icy hill in the countryside.

The phone lines to the office went down this morning and we had to send most people to work from home due to the atrocious commuting conditions.

It’d be great if we could offer more home working for staff – I think a lot of staff think that the reason more companies don’t offer home working is because they don’t trust their staff. That’s really isn’t the case (or at least it isn’t with our business and nor would it be for most successful, strong cultures businesses).

The real problem are things like:

• Workplace health and safety
• Communication systems
• Security of system
• Customer communication

For example, before the introduction of the public smoking ban in the UK, many bars stopped customers from smoking at the bar itself because of the risk to the health of the bar staff, their employees, from passive smoking.

This is because an employer has a responsibility to provide a safe work environment from the staff.

How many people working at home have the appropriate desk, chair and lighting necessary? It amazes me how strict the laws are regarding what particular lighting is legal and what isn’t.

What about computer equipment? If they use their own, should they expense that to the company? If they use a company laptop, is it on a secure internet connection such as a virtual private network? Or do they simply log in to their webmail from a non-secure environment which could be intercepted?

How do you manage calls from customers? What about internal calls from other members of staff? What if you want to have a face to face meeting?

What about training staff who are inexperienced at home working to teach them time management skills and the best way to work from home so they can enjoy work without impinging on their home life?

These are just some of the questions we need to answer – and they’re by no means exhaustive. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not perhaps the most knowledge on the subjective of Health and Safety and HR correctness – that’s why I work with a great team of people who sort out all that stuff!!

But while there are no doubt individual answers to all these questions, to offer home working correctly requires a formal business process that will enable the employee to work as seamlessly from home as he or she would from the office. It requires investment in IT systems and process as well as support from HR for training and management.

So I’m very pleased that work is already under way at WhiteLabelDating.com on new platforms that will allow us to offer effective remote working – whether people are at home, on the move or even thousands of miles away on a beach (ahem).

We’ve got a new moderation system in the pipeline for our Customer Support team (due to go live next month) which has been written completely from scratch to enable us to moderate profiles, photos, videos and messages from anywhere in the world. It’s designed so we can offer localised support for our international sites in the future, but also has the benefit of easier home working for our customer support team which will be critical as we grow to provide true 24/7 customer service.

Support managers can assign moderation tasks to their team (such as to moderate X profiles, Y photos etc) and an audit trail provides an activity feed so managers can see everything their team are doing from anywhere in the world. Our development team have done some fantastic work on the user-interface of the new moderation system to help our staff visualise activity – I’m really looking forward to being able to share this with you when it goes live.

We’ve also upgraded our telecoms system as we move to our new offices in February 2010 to a hybrid Voice Over IP (VoIP) system whereby any incoming or internal calls can be routed through our network to anywhere in the world. This is ideal if we need to redirect out of hours customer service calls to USA in the evenings – but it also allows us to redirect calls to a dedicated handset at home.

Customer care is becoming central to our operations in 2010 – we’re recruiting heavily both internally and externally to build the best customer care team in the industry for both consumers and partners alike.

So if we get hit by an equally freezing winter this time next year, we’ll be much better prepared to support those home workers

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