Making remote working work

There can be all sorts of reasons to work from home, from the usual, such as fitting work around the kids, to the unusual, such as needing to be near hospital while waiting for a transplant.

But as technology enables more and more jobs to be carried out anywhere, companies are finding that offering and encouraging remote working can benefit the organisation as well as the employee. Productivity, hiring and retaining the best staff, and cost efficiencies can all be directly attributed to remote working policies.

Ted Smith, HR director of Vernalis, comments: "We've been allowing our scientists to work remotely for the past four years. At first it was tested in a few areas where the line manager was supportive and there were high levels of trust within the team, but now it has spread quite widely. The real trigger was improvements in IT provision, which allow remote access to large data files and lab systems.

"Now, a biologist in screening can run assays from Monday to Thursday in the labs and then analyse the data and send out the reports from home on Friday. Remote access to lab equipment also allows scientists to set up experiments and then collect the kids from school, checking on-line that the equipment is running correctly to see whether they need to pop back or not, or ask another team member to make any adjustments."

Click here to read the article in full on InPharm.com.