By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

Cable Bahamas’ top executive yesterday said companies must “strike a balance between productivity and flexibility” when employees are working remotely.

Franklyn Butler, the BISX-listed communications group’s president and chief executive, told a webinar that the COVID-19 enforced shift to remote work has “huge implications for productivity in the workplace”.

Asserting that it was now more difficult to assess whether an employee is working or not, given that they are operating at home, he added this has forced companies to carefully weigh how they achieve a balance between staff productivity and flexibility.

Mr Butler said: “That, to me, is probably one of the big areas that I wouldn’t say keeps me up at night, but it’s a big area of concern, because we look at how the pandemic has continued on much longer than I think any of us could have anticipated from where we started from in February 2020.”

Michael Anderson, RF Bank & Trust’s president, told the same webinar: “The biggest learning I’ve had through this whole experience of remote work was also remote discussions taking place across larger areas, and this ability to speak to more people at the same time.”

The remote working trend has forced companies to improve their communication, with senior management logging into meetings from different countries. Mr Anderson said this is a “significant improvement” to pre-COVID office working practices where staff tended to meet in-person to get things done.

Mr Anderson added: “I think, really, it’s enhanced your ability to communicate, and so one of those key aspects of our businesses is how do we always keep in touch with each other. To me that aspect has really been enhanced.

“The other piece, which I think about quite a lot, is this idea of outsourcing remote work.” This is where companies sub-contract work to third party providers based overseas, who perform tasks that locals would previously executed. It also eliminates costs associated with bringing in high-priced specialists from another country.

Jeffrey Beckles, Island Pay’s managing director, said COVID-19 has forced him to focus on employees more and have fewer “rah-rah” sessions. “We’ve had to really look at what impact the pandemic has had on our employees, these really important assets that we have, and how do we first meet their needs,” he added.

“We typically talk about the multiplicity of needs, but then that could have been financial, it could have been physical, it could be emotional. It could be any number of ways that employees were affected.

“So it has forced me as a chief executive to take a very deep look at who we have, how they’ve been affected and how do we best put them in a position where they can be reasonably comfortable to be able to produce the outputs that we have expectations of.”