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The hidden challenges of adjusting to a remote workforce

Author picture

Tore Medhaug

10.06.2020

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3 min

Last week, Business Day reported that Telenor, one of Norway’s biggest corporations, has decided to let its roughly 20,000 employees work remotely as much as they want in the future.

Also Danske Bank, the biggest bank in Denmark, with strong local roots and bridges to the rest of the world, will more or less do the same. And yesterday, the Norwegian newspaper Nettavisen announced that they will allow all their employees to work remotely from now on, as their productivity results skyrocketed during the Covid-19 situation.

Other companies might follow up and do the same in the future. Could this work?

Well, I don’t have the answer, but what I see is, there can be some difficult challenges in adjusting to a remote workforce.

Many companies around the world typically use a file-driven solution for creating large and complex documents. This works great for the intended purpose that is made for – sharing files.

 

File-based solutions – no control

Yesterday I had a great conversation with a global player in the energy sector. They have offices around the world and are facing increased activities in Africa and far East Asia. The challenge they had was that governments around the world have different restrictions regarding quarantines and rules. Their employees were working in different situations, some at the office, some at home, others in the field, and some at the HQ.

They were writing multiple reports about environmental and ethical issues, and obviously these reports are different due to the different countries they were writing to. Using a file-driven solution, you would think it works for splitting up the document and assigning different people to do different tasks.

What they experienced, however, was that they immediately lost control and track of where they are in the document process. And they had to depend on trust, and there is no problem with that, after all they are your colleagues.

Some of the employees were way too busy with other tasks, and could not do the task they were assigned to do in the file-driven solution. If the management knew they would not have assigned this person to do the task. Also, they faced problems with the check in/ check out and struggled with version control, which, in the end, caused them to work on a document that was not their latest version.

I have heard similar stories from other clients as well, and this could easily have been solved in a co-authoring and automation solution like XaitPorter.

 

XaitPorter – when only your “A” game is good enough!

For Telenor and Danske Bank or any other businesses that consider remote workforce or who have offices and departments around the world, XaitPorter is taylormade for this.

XaitPorter has a flexible workflow, meaning as a document owner or a document creator, you will have full visibility over where you are in the process. If someone is busy doing other tasks, you can easily swap this person with another person, who will be notified what section they are supposed to be writing, and the deadline.

XaitPorter also has a built-in version and revision control, and audit log. You can see what changes have been done, and by who.

The contributors are always working on the latest version, meaning you are always compliant and not facing time pressure.

As a curiosity, I want to mention that we automatically take care of formatting, layout and numbering. This will free up time so that you can do other, more value-adding things, like spend a few hours on your local golf course!

 

Ebook collaboration is the new competitive advantage

 

Author picture

Tore Medhaug

Tore holds a Technical degree and has a variety of business courses from BI Norwegian Business School. He has previously worked for different oil service companies and IT companies. Tore used to be Norway's biggest self-proclaimed golf talent, and also has a big passion for Ice hockey.

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