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Enabling Your Remote Workforce Under Increased External Pressures Written by Felix Bailer, Kris Lui, and Erin Dowd, Vertiv With governments around the world mandating employees quarantine at home, companies have launched the largest remote workforce enablement experiment in the world. The move is driven equally by a desire to maintain business continuity, protect workers, and proactively address regional requirements that are changing every day. For some companies the move has been relatively seamless, due to their dispersed, digital workforce, while for others it has been a trial by fire, as they seek to enable workers rapidly and protect staff whose roles demand a continued physical presence. Vertiv began the remote workforce enablement journey in 2018. In an interview, human resources (HR) leaders Felix Bailer, Erin Dowd, and Kris Lui shared insights and best practices from this journey, which accelerated dramatically in 2020 due to the global pandemic. Bailer shares that Vertiv’s journey wasn’t driven only by business continuity motivations in 2018, but the desire to provide a better work-life experience that would create business flexibility, drive employee productivity, and help retain workers in a competitive industry. Informally, workers within Global
Business Services (GBS) were given the option to work from home one to four days a month in all geographies and functions, while those whose jobs required an on-site presence were allowed stagger shifts to better meet their personal needs. That experience came in handy when the market situation required Lui to accelerate the pace in Vertiv’s Asia-Pacific region in February. The following are lessons learned that could help in your own remote workforce enablement efforts. Get Business Input on Remote Working If your company is going remote for the first time or is scaling a remote workforce initiative, Dowd recommends getting cross-functional input, even if it is done at speed. At Vertiv, HR business partners led this effort, conducting workshops, surveys, and business need reviews. Key factors to consider are business and customer requirements, key roles, the nature of work to be performed, regional cultures and processes, digital tools required, business continuity, security, and more. Move Swiftly Amidst Changing Conditions Vertiv had piloted working from home in the company’s Manilla office, but the global health crisis struck before the model was deployed more fully in the region. Lui’s Asia-Pacific HR team
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members led the effort to introduce employees to remote working, starting in the north Asia sub-region during the Chinese New Year. Her team’s work involved monitoring governmental mandates, locating staff, making sure they were safe, ensuring they had the needed technology, and determining if facilities had robust sanitation equipment and procedures. After getting government’s approval, the team also needed to get staff ready for a phased return to work. Fortunately, Vertiv was deemed an essential business around the globe, including in the China, India and North American markets. After about a month working remotely, 99 percent of staff in China have been able to return to the office but are still wearing masks and using multiple sanitation procedures to keep the work environment safe for colleagues. To restart operations, a business continuity team, including the north Asia sub-regional president and cross-functional leaders, met every day to plan mission-critical work. Communicate to Employees with Empathy With recent events, change has been enormous. New developments have unfolded daily, forcing companies and workers to adapt. Vertiv leadership communicated early and often, to ensure that team members knew leaders
