Working from home has saved the jobs of millions during this world-wide shut down, with 98 percent of companies implementing work at home, according to a survey by Challenger, Grey, and Christmas. But, that figure is misleading. Just because 98 percent of companies have people working from home now, doesn’t mean that 98 percent of people are working from home.
The University of Chicago estimates that only 34 percent of jobs can be done in their entirety from home, which accounts for 44 percent of salaries. So, as we would expect, work at home jobs favor the well paid, but not to such an extreme as to obliterate the other jobs.
If you take a look at the jobless numbers--17 million people filing for unemployment in the past three weeks–it’s obvious that many, many people can’t work from home and aren’t considered essential workers.
If your business is one of these, and you’re chomping at the bit to re-open or bring your works back to full productivity, you need to be the first prepared. Here’s what you need to be doing now.
To keep reading, click here: How to Re-open Your Business
Share your own re-opening tips in the comments!
COVID-19 caused a lot of employers to take a fresh look at telecommuting. Many employees that never previously worked from home were allowed to do so during the shutdown, by necessity. Perhaps some of those employees — myself included — could continue working from home, at least part of the time, which would facilitate social distancing in the workplace.
I am going to view this topic from the eyes of a retailer who needs employees to do the job in person and evaluate how to separate customer and employee contact without eliminating customers from browsing the store. It would have to be a miniature version of what is occurring in the supermarket. This may require shielding and better video surveillance to eliminate close interactions. Staffing has to be maintained differently, you may have to either limit hours of operation to cover dual staffing or increase staffing across the hours of operation. Since labor cost is a high cost for most employers, this will have to be decided carefully and not from the shareholders’ viewpoint of straight profit.