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Digital Transformation

Home working ‘effective’ for dealing with Olympic disruption

Allowing employees to work from home could be the best way to avoid the threat to continuity during the Games

As the Olympics draw ever closer, many businesses have been formulating strategies designed to ensure that their productivity is not hampered by the upheaval that the capital is set to witness.

And as part of a stress test conducted by the Canary Wharf Group and Deloitte, 100 companies have assessed the effectiveness of different operating policies that could help combat the disruption come the start of the event.

With 85 per cent of the businesses who analysed the efficiency of home working as the best means to deal with the threat to continuity finding it to be either effective or very effective, it appears that allowing employees to perform their tasks from home is the ideal way to avoid a drop in output during the Games.

"It isn’t clear how many of the participants had existing home working policies in place, but it is not surprising to find this well established working practice perform well," said Mark Naysmith, Games readiness director at Deloitte.

"If an organisation has confidence in the effectiveness of these measures they are more likely to use them when they really need them."

Given that allowing staff to work from home means that they will not be competing with the thousands of extra passengers on tubes, trains and buses, the risk that they will not make it into the office in time can be easily averted if they’re performing their tasks from the comfort of their domestic study.

While there are a range of ways in which to support such employees, backing up files in a cloud network and using a digital mailroom could be two of the most vital in terms of enabling data sharing among colleagues in various locations.

Indeed, this is an important factor to consider when it comes to ensuring confusion does not arise between workers who are unable to communicate effectively, so enabling them to coordinate as they would do in the office is also key.