Manager discusses the positives and pitfalls of a remote team
New Zealand may be living a relatively normal life under Alert Level 1, but working from home is an ongoing reality for many employees, and, according to KPMG’s banking and finance head John Kensington, firms should be taking an ‘on an individual basis’ approach when it comes to the future of the office.
Kensington says that the April and August lockdowns demonstrated the speed with which contingency plans can be implemented when absolutely necessary, but he warns that firms should not forget to build up a strong company culture - particularly with more people working from home part- or full-time.
“Working from home - you either love it or you hate it. I think it’s such an individual thing that there’s no right or wrong answer, but we’ve made some quite astonishing observations here at KPMG,” Kensington said.
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“We were in the process of moving from Skype to Teams and setting ourselves up to work from home. From 10 days before lockdown to four days after it, we managed to covert everyone at KPMG on to new or updated computers, get our VPN to work for all of them, and implement Teams across the firm.”
“If we’d done that on a normal rollout, we’d still be doing it now division by division, and giving people eight months to object to it and not do it,” he continued.
“So it really taught us that you can rush-launch things when you absolutely have to while making sure that they work. But the challenge that comes with that is how you can retain culture.”
Kensington says that culture is something that is very easy to let slide when working with a remote team, and while many organisations invested heavily in communications throughout lockdown, that may have fallen off somewhat since.
“Our culture is built up and chipped away at every day, and working from home, your culture is a bit like a sandstone cliff with the wind and waves chipping away at it,” Kensington said.
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“If you come back in a few years, it’ll look very different if you aren’t building it up.”
“Things like training and mentoring are important, and if you’re bringing staff in, do it for the things that they can’t do at home,” he added.
“There was an absolute increase in communications through lockdown, but I think that needs to be tailored to the individual. Mental health is also another aspect, and we need to be much more aware of it than we have been before.”
