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At Home in the Dark

The recent Rogers outage has highlighted a common issue impacting our post-Covid workforce: how do you work from home without the services that you need? Network outages, power failures, and the dreaded system updates all impact our ability to work and stay connected. But whose responsibility is it to ensure that we have access to the resources that we need at home?

By Elleni Koskinen

Elleni Koskinen is the editor of the Advisor, a researcher, and oversees TMC benchmarking studies.

Current Advice

A quick Google search of working from home during a power or network outage will yield the following advice:

  1. Go to a café that has free Wi-Fi.
  2. Use your cellphone to hot-spot

your other devices.

  1. Purchase a mobile broadband USB stick.
  2. Use your car to charge your electronics.
  3. Buy a backup generator.
  4. Go back to the office.

What does all of this advice have in common? It puts the onus onto the employee to fix the problem, often funding it out of their own pockets. Many staff do not have the resources required to adapt to network failures or power outages. Almost half of all working Canadians live paycheque to paycheque, so they likely would not be able to afford the additional (but necessary) equipment or service costs. Alternatively, even if they could afford it, they may not have access to a car to relocate to an area that’s unaffected by the outage, or they may not have childcare available on short notice.

So, what can companies do to ensure that their staff, especially essential personnel, can stay connected in the face of failure? Many of the suggestions listed above can be funded by employers, including backup power, secondary network equipment, or company cell phones that can be used for hot-spotting.

Set Them Up for Success

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic when employees were first sent home, some employers also sent home equipment, and paid for a portion of the employees’ personal internet. This was so that they would be able to complete their tasks even when they weren’t in the office. Unfortunately, now that many organizations have re-introduced working from the office, the push to supply workers staying at home with the necessary tools for success has somewhat fallen by the wayside.

As we’ve seen from the recent Rogers outage, when networks fail, businesses can take a huge hit. Just as disaster planning needs to occur in the workplace, continuity plans need to exist for essential employees that work remotely as well. Organizations need to harden their employees’ connections (wherever they’re connecting from), and shouldn’t expect them to pay for it. After all, you wouldn’t charge your employee in the office for the space their files take up on backup servers, or expect them to pay rent in the emergency office space if your workplace had to temporarily relocate.

The Future of the Office

  1. % of Canadians in 2022 reported that they are doing most of their work remotely (up from 4% before the pandemic). It’s time that they were included in business continuity planning, without having to fund it themselves.

If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at .

This article was published in the July 2022 edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:9 Issue:3

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