The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the number of people working from home in what many are calling the greatest work experiment of our time. In 2019 only around one in 20 people employed in the European Union worked from home – a figure that has remained constant for a decade. The International Labour Organisation estimates that 7.9% of the world’s workforce, some 260 million workers, worked from home on a permanent basis before the pandemic, but many of these were self-employed or artisans rather than employees. Globally, among employees, only 2.9% were working exclusively or mainly from their home before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Since the coronavirus outbreak, the numbers have mushroomed. The UK’s government said in April 2020 that 46.6% of people were working at least some of the time at home – 86% as a result of the pandemic. COVID-19 has shown that working from home works, and employees are at least as productive, if not more so. No wonder some finance directors are rubbing their hands with glee as to the workplace cost savings they could make by continuing with a work-from-home policy, at least some of the time.

But the problem is that lockdown and long-term are not the same thing. Once people feel safe to go back into the office, their motivation for homeworking may change. And while there has been a lot of guidance on the ‘how’ of remote working, how do you know who are the types of people suited to working from home? How do you make this work for your business long-term? And how do you know, when you are recruiting new people, that they have the skills and behaviours to be productive working from home if that is the policy you pursue?

A psychometric assessment is one tool that can help but many organisations only use assessments for senior roles because of the complexity and cost, despite the greatest people cost for businesses being in more junior roles. Plus, what’s the point in using an assessment if the decision is based on cost rather than functionality? If, for example, you want to understand who will flourish when working remotely in the longer term, you need to ensure that is what your assessment is validated for. But there are hundreds of assessments available in the UK and many have been around for decades, still measuring the same things they did when they were first created, despite the seismic changes in the world of work. They are usually fixed in terms of length, content, complexity and cost, factors determined by the provider not the customer. In addition, such assessments can often only be used/interpreted/fed back by accredited users, with accreditation gained at great expense to the organisation. So, in other words, assessments can be too long, too expensive and too complex.