Is homeworking efficient? We believe so but…
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Is homeworking efficient? Working from home is now commonplace but does it work? The answer to a great extent must lie with the attitude of the individuals concerned. For HallmarkFIX, a small company with just 5 office based staff, the transition was fairly easy. Planning for home working started with the tanker drivers strike in the year 2000 when fuel was in short supply. ‘We learnt hard lessons early on, so when the pandemic hit we were 95% ready’ says Roger Grimshaw, Director and founder of the company.
No Service Disruption
Whilst regular SWOT analyses never mentioned a pandemic, remote working had been core to the company’s thinking for over 20 years. Consequently, we are proud that our customers saw no reduction in the level of service. That’s not to say that it was easy! In 2020, as Covid raged, we moved from a paper based office filing system to an online, cloud based operation. In addition we installed a new CRM and bespoke operational database as well as integrating a new, large customer. Oh yes, and we closed our office; permanently. So, is homeworking efficient? It’s certainly working for us but 2020 was quite a year!
Service Engineers
With engineers using fully equipped vans and carrying large stocks of spares, the first question was; were they allowed to travel? Our answer to that was clear after visiting the HSE website. We posted this to our own website and made it clear that we would follow the guidelines at all times.
Conclusion
Home working has made us more productive (no wasted time commuting), dramatically improved transparency for management and reduced our overheads. All of this will benefit our customers, particularly as the response time to emails is almost always immediate whilst phone calls are handled through a specialist answering service.