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Home Working: What it means for SMEs

May 18, 2020

Mat Durham

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The coronavirus has forced SMEs to adapt and modernise very quickly. One of the primary ways they've done that is to adopt home working.

As someone currently working from home and involved with a lot of SMEs, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what that might mean. Based on my own experience, here are four ways in which it might make our economy far more efficient going forwards:

1) Lower overheads

For a lot of SMEs, office space is often the main expense after wages. For them, a move towards home working will deliver an immediate and significant reduction in outgoings, freeing up cash to plough into other areas of the business.

2) Productivity

One of the main objections to home working are the real and imagined productivity issues associated with it. However, many of these are solved when everybody is working from home and the organisation as a whole is forced to adapt. For example, by adopting the use of regular online meetings and online productivity tools. Furthermore, home working has the potential to make workers more productive:

3) Commuting

In England, the average commuter spends an hour every day commuting. With remote working, that figure falls to zero. Over a year, that's an additional 6 full weeks that employee could be working without eating into their own time. To put another spin on it, a morale-boosting extra hour a day to themselves.

4) Distance

As people become more comfortable with business relationships which exist almost or entirely online, reasons to use a local supplier fall away. This could deliver a significant boost to regions outside of our major cities. For example, a graphic designer in London will almost certainly charge several times more than an equally talented graphic designer in Truro or Hereford.

To conclude, I think it's a mistake to see this period of time as a temporary change. Many of the leaps taken and lessons learned will persist long after the virus. There will be negatives, but I believe the positives may well prove a boon to our economy.
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