An experiment in remote work

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

-William Blake

I am a big evangelist of the school of thought that if anyhowness (the acceptable practice of mediocrity) is reduced to a bare minimum in Nigeria, we would have better individuals, families, firms and a great nation. Even though the whole of the logical world, seems to have started to implement remote work as a strategy to combat the coronavirus pandemic, we, as usual, are waiting for the worst to happen, before we do anything “too drastic”. We are waiting for Covid-19 patient 30 before we close the schools and ask everyone to work from home.

I believe that if something is wrong, the least one can do is to point it out and proffer a solution. My humble proposition is an experiment for all firms, who want to reduce their chances of a massive loss if we ever get to an epidemic level in Nigeria. This experiment I hope will help minimize risk and assist firms to gain value from their employees in case of an epidemic. My suggestions are more applicable to professional services firms (people who mostly work on laptops) but I believe any type of firm can and should give it a shot, that way you can know if your company will be grounded to a halt by the disease or otherwise.

My proposition is simple, over the next week randomly assign 25% of your workforce to work from home for 3 randomly selected days of the week. Then follow up every day with a questionnaire that asks the following question to the person that is working from work, the person's supervisor and the person's peer whose work somehow depends on the candidate selected for remote work.

For the candidate on remote work ask the following questions:

1.      What will make your work easier while working from home?

2.      What is the greatest difficulty you have with getting things done remotely?

For their supervisor where applicable ask these questions:

1.      Was the employee more productive or less productive due to working remotely?

2.      What task is the most difficult to achieve while the employee was not in the office?

For the employee’s peer ask the following questions:

1.      In what way has the candidate’s unavailability at work affected you?

2.      What is the 1 thing that will make working with the candidate remotely easier?

You will have to repeat the same experiment the following week but this time with 50% of the employees and 4 randomly selected workdays and then deploy questions daily. Please repeat for the third week with 75% of your employees for 5 days and off course analyze the results. The essence of the whole experiment is for you to get a feel for what adjustments the organization will have to make to continue to add value if a shutdown becomes necessary, avoid the temptation to remove executives from the randomized list. I do hope we never have an epidemic but it’s better to be prepared than to be sorry.