Working from Home and Changing Times

One thing the pandemic has done which has made companies more resilient is to normalize working from home for office jobs.

From a BCP perspective this has a number of advantages:

• Staff can continue working even if their place of work is physically unusable or unreachable.
• Staff can continue working if they are asymptomatic even if they may potentially be carriers of a deadly disease.
• The risk of workplace transmission of disease is eliminated, making it less likely that an entire department will have to shut down due to staff absence.

Against this are a number of factors:

• Lack of trust in staff: are they working or shirking?
• A changed security structure: confidential information and your internal network is at risk from poorly secured home computers, physical theft of laptops, and mistakes by family members.
• Lack of communication between staff. if you're like me, you learn from casual conversation at work. These conversations just don't happen by video or text.

The forced working from home has made acceptance of these disadvantages much easier. In the past, I had a business continuity solution rejected because it recommended giving employees a laptop and asking them to work from home if they couldn't reach or use the office. I doubt that approach would be rejected now.

Are there changes you can make to your business continuity plan to take advantage of this change in attitude?