Coronavirus (COVID-19) | Continuity of business and working from home

With increasing cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) diagnosed around the world, potential school and business lockdowns will bring new challenges for the business community. BundyPlus reviewed its continuity of work plan, and we are committed to providing a safe environment for our employees and ensuring business continuity of services to our customers and partners. We are confident that coronavirus will not significantly impact BundyPlus and our community of users. Thank you for your continued trust in us.

While we continue our work, as usual, we are preparing for different scenarios, including the possibility of the majority of our team working from home. Fortunately, BundyPlus essential day-to-day operations utilise cloud-based services located on robust offsite infrastructure. Work from home programs have been in place and regularly used with great success. 

Other businesses looking to introduce a work from home program should create specific guidelines to ensure all employees understand what is required from them when they work remotely. The critical elements of work from home policy, which should be shared with the entire staff, including:

• Trusting your employees: One of the most crucial aspects of a work from home policy isn’t included in the actual document. Employers need to have trust in their employees to get their jobs done when they are not working onsite. 

• Record employee start, stop and break times: Accurate recording of timesheets at the workplace is no different from working at home. Accuracy and reliability are the two main drivers for seamless employee timesheet processing. The ability to be able to see when and where your employees are at any time can be difficult. Luckily BundyPlus mobile and cloud services make the impossible task possible. You can now get an insight into staff locations and activities right from your phone or desktop in realtime.

BundyPlus provides solutions that are incredibly flexible and configurable to suit your workforce tracking requirements. BundyPlus Studio (desktop), BundyPlus Live (cloud) and BundyPlus Now(mobile). 

• Having the proper technology: Computer, email, phone conferencing, access to internal networks are all tools that employees need, whether they work from home or a public location. 

 • Using a secure connection: Remote workers should have a secured Wi-Fi network and work with a trusted virtual private network (VPN). The VPN serves as a buffer between the Wi-Fi connection and your mobile device or laptop. Any transmitted data is then encrypted to protect it from tampering and interception. 

• Implementing communications programs: Stay in touch with employees who work from home via Teams, Skype, Slack and other messaging services. At times, remote workers can feel isolated from the rest of the team, so it is vital to keep in contact with them via phone, email, messaging, or video conference.

• Setting clear expectations in your work from home policy: Create a work from home policy with your specific expectations of the program. The policy would include instructions for an employee’s daily work schedule, your company’s overtime policy, description of a dedicated workspace, instructions for reporting personal injury and damage to company equipment, and protection of proprietary company information.

 • Testing the work from home program: If you are implementing a work from home policy, take the time to evaluate its effectiveness after at least six months. Adjust the program based on your findings.