Work remote policy and hybrid strategy

Before creating your work remote policy, it’s worth drawing up a plan in order to standardise your remote and hybrid work strategy. During this time, you can also work out a possible budget for remote work, as well as whether you’ll need your employees to come into the office on occasion. Some other considerations could include:

• creating schedules for your employees
• adopting new project management tools
• adopting new communication tools such as video conferencing technology
• deciding which technology your employees will need
• deciding what responsibilities your remote-working employees will have
• when and how your employees will be able to work on a remote basis
• whether you’ll need to create any reasonable adjustments for disabled employees
• whether the remote work policy is temporary or permanent
• working out how to measure the performance of your remote-working employees.

Creating a remote and hybrid work strategy, therefore, provides some conditions for how and when your employees are able to work on a remote basis.

Remote worker rights

Although this will vary depending on the needs of your company, your employees have some legal rights to take into consideration when you’re drawing up a plan. Even if your employees are working from home, you still need to follow the UK government’s legislation on employee rights as they are still working for you. However, this may change over time to meet new needs, as more employers turn to remote and hybrid working. 

The UK government says that all employees are entitled to request flexible working. This can include the time they start and finish work. For more information on flexible working, please visit the UK government website. 

According to the government, employers must make sure that their employees are working in a safe environment. Although remote working means that you won’t be able to perform a risk assessment, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) advises that employers carry out a risk assessment: ‘on roles now being carried out remotely to identify specific issues that may need mitigation.’

The CPNI also says that companies should: ‘encourage good working practices and a secure environment for remote workers during COVID-19 either in a shared hub or working from home.’ If you’re looking for more guidance on conducting risk and security assessments for remote working employees, please read the CPNI’s guide.

Cybersecurity

Another important consideration you might want to make is enrolling your employees on cybersecurity training. With your employees working off-site, you may wish to strengthen your data protection strategy. As your employees might be sharing company files or client information via cloud software or email sometimes over public Wi-Fi, it’s worth considering the risks involved with this. One option here is to ask your employees to use a virtual private network (VPN) in order to protect them from hackers. A virtual private network is a secure tunnel between their devices and the internet which can protect their internet traffic keeping their identity private online.

Creating a remote work policy: a guide

Now that you are familiar with creating a work remote strategy (including the law surrounding doing so), you can begin to look at creating your policy.

Outlining the purpose of the policy

Here, you can state that the purpose of your work remote policy or flexible work hours policy is to create an agreement between you the employer and your employee about how and when they can work on a remote basis. This can include:

• your employee’s hours
• whether there are any flexible work arrangements
• whether you need to conduct any risk assessments
• any required cybersecurity training your employees need to undertake
• how you plan to communicate with your remote-working employees
• looking at whether there will be any changes to taxation
• any additional training your employees need to be able to work remotely

It’s useful to state your requirements as clearly as possible so it’s easy for all of your employees to follow. It’s also a good idea to describe how you plan to carry out any training or assessments, making sure that it’s accessible to all of your employees regardless of ability. 

Not all roles will be suited to remote work, so you can use your policy to outline the conditions that the role needs to meet in order to be eligible. You may, however, offer flexible working to all of your employees regardless of role. Some of the conditions for eligibility could also include:

• the employee has a track record of being trustworthy
• they are able to manage their own workload and have good time management strategies
• their role does not require any specialist equipment that can only be accessed on-site rather than remotely
• either the employee is able to provide their own tools to complete their responsibilities or you as their employer can provide them with these tools

Below are some sections which you can include in your policy. While you might not need to include some of these sections, it is a good idea to include your employee’s legal rights in the policy. 

Communication

You can also use your work remote policy to discuss how you plan to communicate with your employees and how you expect your employees to communicate with each other. If you’re only communicating via email, this can potentially lead to miscommunication or a message being missed. You can discuss which tools you hope to use in your policy, which could include:

• video conferencing
• messaging programmes
• project management software
• cloud storage systems
• team collaboration software
• productivity tools
• noise cancelling tools
• calendar management tools

In your policy, you might discuss the different ways you plan to hold meetings and discussions in your new communication strategy. You might choose to use different communication tools depending on the meeting.

One tool might work best for one-on-one meetings with an employee, while another might be better for recording a presentation. Some tools allow for file sharing and commentary, too, which could be useful if you’re planning for a group discussion. 

You can make working as part of a remote team more sociable with communication tools as well. 

Work schedule instructions

Here you can create an agreement about your employee’s working arrangements. You can use this section to state clearly any changes to your employee’s working day and how they should adapt to their new schedule.

As a remote working day can look very different to a traditional working day, you might want to outline the new metrics you’ll be planning to measure productivity. This might not be by the number of hours an employee is working but by the quality and quantity of the work produced.

You might choose to set deadlines and have your employees meet them. At the end of the day, which metrics are right for your company will vary on the type of work your employee is doing and how they’re expected to complete it. One way to measure an employee’s productivity is by using a project management system. 

Here, you can also discuss how you plan to set deadlines and which tools you will all be using to manage them. The policy could outline which communication and project management tools you will be using to ensure that you don’t miss any deadlines.

One benefit of using some project management tools is that you can use analytics to look at how productive your employees are. You might also use these tools to look at the quality of the work that your employees are producing as well.

Creating a work remote policy is a great way to make sure that your employees understand what you expect from them during remote work or flexible work arrangements. This will provide both you and your employees with an agreement that also states their remote working rights as well. A remote work policy can also discuss which tools and training will be available to an employee if you both choose for them to work on a remote basis.