It seems working from home is here to stay, particularly if you’re connected to the Business Process Outsourcing industry, or the rapidly growing Philippines-based, digital outsourcing industry.

According to the Alliance of Call Center Workers (ACW), a significant number of BPO workers are willing to resign if Work-From-Home (WFH) is not extended beyond 31st March.

The Fiscal Incentives Review Board (FIRB) continues to uphold the non-extension of the WFH scheme for IT-BPM enterprises. If workers are not back on site, and working from the office, Information Technology-business process management (IT-BPM) will lose their incentives such as tax breaks.

ACW co-convenor Lara Melencio, highlighted that the call center workers’ nature of work was remote, considering that their clients and customers are abroad, “If we can work anywhere as long as we have the equipment, the internet connection, and the electricity, why can’t we just stay with that?” Melencio asked.”

It’s important to consider people and businesses have been able to adapt over the past two years. Working from Home is no longer a pipe dream, it’s expected. Other factors impacting a return to office work:

• • Inflation: Increased travel costs

• • Travel time: More congestion, and more traffic as people shifted away from public transport as protection from covid

• • Proximity to work: Workers have moved back to their provinces away from their rented city dwellings

• • Re-introduced Quarantine: Possible government orders if covid cases increase

In August 2020, USource had already accepted the shift. We understood our employees wanted to work from home, and what we noticed between the start of the pandemic and the remainder of 2020 was our employees were more productive when Working From Home.

Our clients are based overseas. As a business, we’re able to measure productivity on a minute-to-minute basis and have clear optics on staff whereabouts and availability by leveraging the digital applications we’ve been using since 2016.

Before making the switch to 100% Work From Home, with an office-based hub (when needed), we did consider:

Scheduled Days:

Team Members will be required to WFO on specific days.

Unscheduled Days:

Are days the Team Members have been approved to WFH home but have decided to WFO.

Team Rotation:

Team members, along with their Team Manager and Team have Scheduled Days for WFH and WFO.

All these options are viable, and they create hybrid working environments, which are beneficial for employees. For us, being a digital outsourcing company we asked ourselves a simple question: why are we forcing our employees to travel to work to sit in front of a computer for their entire work day? Employees were happier working from home, we noticed productivity improvements, and is 100% working from home made us rethink every part of our business and how we can do it with a distributed workforce using digital technology.

If we mandated employees returned to the office by a specific date we would expect rapid resignations. There are now simply too many choices in the Philippines to work online, and earn an income, without having to return to a traditional office-based job in the BPO industry.

The pandemic sped up a digital shift with the ability to work from home. We feel it’s here to stay.