The Office is dead, long live Hybrid Working. Since Coronavirus sent almost everyone home during 2020, the concept of remote or hybrid working has taken hold and is being hailed as the new normal, giving many the chance to work from home, or mix working in the office with working from home. And everyone loves this new found liberating model!
But hybrid working is not all good news. Before we start calling this the new normal, we should see it more for what it really is: an exciting work experiment that is still in its infancy. Whilst many see great positives in the ability to work remotely, there are just as many that are realising the downsides, finding it emotionally more taxing than working full time in the office. Studies cite fractured working culture, eroding boundaries between work and home, isolation, lack of uniformity, and missing out on communicating and mixing in-person.
I can understand this. My own working career included years working at large consulting firms, which meant moving around a lot, visiting many different client offices, some working from home, always nomadically carrying your laptop wherever you go. This meant a very fractured working culture, hardly ever seeing your team, and never having a regular routine. Whilst the work experience was excellent, many just couldn’t sustain it and left to join a more “settled” working environment.
People are inherently lazy. A statement to grab your attention. That was apparently Jeff Bezos’s belief that led him to introduce Amazon’s monitoring systems and AI solutions to make sure that staff were keeping productive. He is not alone, with other studies reaching the overall conclusion that your staff are as much an asset as a liability. “people’s desire to perform well decreases over time” … “employees have a sense of entitlement but not the desire to acquire the skills” … “they actively search for reasons to resist company rules and initiatives”. Of course, we all know that this is not universally true, and it would be wrong to tar everyone with the same brush. But in a corporate world of value chains, processes and controls, a value chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and if you have weak links, you have control problems.
A breeding ground for control failures. I am not suggesting that the whole corporate world is going to turn into an anarchic disjointed work environment with half the people sitting at home eating crisps and watching Cash in the Attic instead of working. All I am saying is we need to be aware of the risks. There will be people who (for whatever reason) become less effective in the hybrid working environment which can cause productivity to drop off or possibly vanish entirely. The key is recognising these new, emerging risks.
Trust vs. Evidence. So how do you put in place simple, effective controls to mitigate these new risks? Firstly, you need to emotionally detach yourself from trusting your employees. This is not personal, this is business. When things go wrong, your board of directors, audit committee or regulator will not care that you trusted them. You will need hard evidence of what was done and when. And collecting evidence digitally is going to be the most effective and efficient way to do this, allowing everything to be collected and reviewed remotely, no more lost files and papers, everything immediately available.
Define, Assign, Remind, Monitor, Escalate, Review. In order to achieve this, you need to put in place some groundwork:
- Define the processes, risks and controls. Ensure that the activities are documented, their inherent risks are understood, and that suitable controls are designed.
- Assign these to individual owners (or teams) so that they know they are accountable.
- Remind: Ensure control performance. Use automated workflow to remind owners and control performers of their responsibilities to complete these activities on time, and digitally capture evidence that the work has been done, with timestamps, files, notes and commentary of issues.
- Monitor and Escalate: Monitor the completion of controls, ensuring performance is completed on-time. Produce this information “real time” so that exceptions are identified and escalated immediately.
- Review design and operational effectiveness. Periodically review the operational effectiveness, looking at captured evidence closely to ensure that what should be happening is happening. Examine process and control documentation to determine if their design is still effective and meeting the business needs.
Self Assessment is the key to success. None of this is new. The key is to instil a “self-assessment” approach, so that individuals who are responsible spend a few minutes each day capturing the evidence of what they have done, whether this is remotely from home, from their office, or out in the field. This will provide a rich source of data that allows for automated monitoring and review that can also be performed remotely.
This does require a technical solution that allows all these steps to be captured digitally and monitored automatically, something where:
- staff are sent reminders of what they need to be doing and by when, regardless of where they are working
- evidence is captured digitally, centrally and securely so that it cannot be tampered with once uploaded
- real time dashboards are created that allow continuous monitoring by first line management, second line control teams or third line audit functions
- automated escalations are sent to late performers and their managers, removing the time taken to follow-up with individuals and driving better behaviour and performance
- there is full remote access to evidence and reporting, allowing process and control performers, managers or control/audit teams to be located anywhere in the world
If you want to discuss these ideas further do not hesitate to get in touch.
Mark Holder
About ICE
ICE is a nimble and practical internal control and compliance solution that focuses on engaging and
enabling all THREE LINES. For more information visit https://www.ice-control.co.uk