The Cost of Working Remotely During Lockdown – Running Your Business

Featured Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

For the past several weeks, due to Covid-19, much of the country’s workforce has been working remotely from home. Therefore, many have turned to video calls and instant messaging apps.

Of course, workers need to stay in touch with their colleagues, teams, managers, and employers. Moreover, platforms such as Zoom and Skype have enabled them to keep in touch and continue to work.

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What Is the Cost to Businesses of Employees Working Remotely?

Working remotely from home will naturally lead to more time spent in video meetings so that employees can discuss their work. Projects must continue, and there are lot of other things that need to get done. But what is the additional cost of this extra time spent in meetings?

The team at CIPHR.com have developed a calculator to answer that exact question. Their tool shows the exact cost, in terms of an employee’s salary, of time spent in meetings per month.

What Does This Look Like for the Typical Office Worker?

The average salary in the UK is around £29,000 per year. According to a study in The Independent, on average we spend around eight hours per week in meetings at work.

Dropping these figures into CIPHR’s meetings calculator shows a figure of a whopping £560 worth of work time spent in meetings each month. (For our US readers, this translates to roughly $606 a month.)

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To help visualize how much time this is over a working month, the calculator says you could have used this time to create 480 servings of fresh pasta from scratch!

What Is the Cost of Working Remotely for Executives?

What about executives, who tend to spend more time in meetings and also typically take home much larger salaries?

According to Inc.com, executives spent an eye-watering 25 hours per week in meetings. If we estimate a salary of £100,000 per year, that equates to a cost of £5,270 for time spent in meetings, at 100 hours per month. This is the same amount of time you would need to learn beginner Spanish.

Use the CIPHR Calculator to Find out How Much Remote Working Is Costing Your Business

Commenting on the release of the virtual meeting calculator, David Richter, director of marketing at CIPHR, said: “This new calculator puts a light-hearted spin on the sudden increase of virtual meetings and chats that many organizations are adjusting to.”

He continued, “Next time you’re about to send a virtual meeting request, think: Could this be an email instead? Is every person on the invitation list genuinely required (or is there anyone important missing)? Will it really take an hour, or will 15 or 30 minutes suffice?

“And when you’re in a virtual meeting, respect your coworkers’ time and stay on topic. Equally, while chat apps are a great way for colleagues to keep in touch in an informal way, too many notifications can end up being distracting. If you want an answer to a question that’s not urgent, email may be best. And if you need a block of time to focus on an activity, change your notification settings to ‘do not disturb.’”

“Remember,” he added, “virtual meetings and chat apps are just some of the ways to communicate information. For critical announcements, organizations might find it more effective to use functionality available in specialist HR systems like CIPHR.”

How Will You Keep Your Costs Down During Lockdown?

Use the suggestions in this article to help you find ways of keeping the cost of remote working down in your business.

To learn more about how other small-business owners are surviving and even thriving during the Covid-19 pandemic, visit our blog often.