What is Dual Working?
What is Dual Working?
Dual working is the practice of completing your working week by working both in a traditional office environment and at home. Employees might work from home, or from anywhere that is not their regular company-based office. Dual Workers will work 2-3 days per week at home and the remainder on-site in their company office.
Dual working places adult development at the centre of its ethos, allowing employees to take control of their own job, career and time, creating a life balance that has proven to increase productivity. However, productivity will only work if you have the right business culture set up in your organisation for dual or dispersed workforces to operate correctly. Listen to our CEO Adam Coleman talk about dual working on Down to Business with Bobby Kerr on Newstalk:
Creating your company culture
Begin by creating Principles & Behaviours that reflect your company values. Once you have laid out these values, create an employee handbook and make it part of the onboarding process. New employees need to know from the very beginning the ethos of your business and have read, understood and signed their employee handbook. These documents are invaluable as they state from the outset what expectations an employer has from the start.
Measuring Success
You must have to correct tools in place to measure success and if your team is coping well with their new work pattern. In our company, all meetings that have more than two people in attendance are recorded in Microsoft Teams. This is a brilliant way for employees who were off or unable to attend to stay part of the story. We have put this in place to practice open transparency which is a vital part of our culture. We use HRLocker to measure and track productivity through timesheets, performance management and much more.
Trust
You can put as many scheduled meetings and systems in place to help to make remote/dual working a solution for your business, but it all must start from a core foundation. ‘Trust and Truth’. Do you trust your people to be productive at home while they work? Have you put all the correct behaviours and technologies in place to allow your employees to work in a dispersed way? If you follow these simple yet effective guidelines, you can Recruit for it, Reward for it and promote for it.
Trust will help your business to be successful!
