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Your Company Will Get A Taste of Remote Work. What Happens Post-Coronavirus Crisis? Try This Hybrid Remote Schedule That Works.
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Thousands of “knowledge companies,” including ours, are supporting a temporary 100% work-from-home (WFH) workforce during the coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. This precautionary move is inadvertently serving as a remote-work pilot test for onsite employees.
The eventual return to the office will reinstitute the traditional in-person interaction, high-bandwidth conversations, and workday normalcy. But employees will miss the newfound productivity and happiness that’s relished in a work environment free from communal distractions and soul-crushing commutes. And company leadership will likely be surprised that productivity and communication did not take the hit they thought it would.
Let’s take this unprecedented time to rethink the workplace. Does it truly make sense to require knowledge workers to commute every day to perform work tasks that can be done remotely using 21st century technology? If you’re on the fence, I suggest you try a semi-remote, rotating scheduling framework, or what we’ve termed Rotational Regional Remote (R3). R3 is a partial WFH system that balances the desires of both the employee and the company.
R3 deploys a 50% WFH schedule that provides the flexibility employees want and the facetime we need (all employees see one another within six business days). There’s even a cost-savings benefit as R3 is designed to minimize desks, and therefore, office square footage.
Like other fast-growing software companies based in metropolitan areas, we face:
- A constricted talent pool,
- with a desire for in-person interaction,
- in the face of the nation’s second worst commuting city,
- with a workforce that values flexibility,
- where some younger employees looking for a place to grow and thrive or even sit,
- with a company in a stage where cash conservation is still paramount, and
- on rare occasions, deal with black-swan events like the novel coronavirus crisis.
More than six months since the start of the R3 experiment at ChurnZero, we have codified it as permanent as we continue to hit our business goals and receive strong Net Promoter Score® (NPS) scores from employees. Read our R3 (Rotational Regional Remote) Guide to learn how to adopt and implement this remote work schedule today.
