Why your employer does not trust you to work from home
A largely manual economy that demands hands-on workers, a culture of truancy, and low productivity are among the things employers cite for forcing most Kenyan workers to return to office.
Three years after Covid-19 employers are writing to their staff working from home compelling them to return to office as they end remote work.
While companies were willing to experiment with working from home and hybrid arrangements to take advantage of lower costs and smaller office space, employers say, the disadvantages outweighed most of the benefits.
Jacqueline Mugo the Executive Director and CEO of the Federation of Kenya Employers says her members have raised concerns about employee performance especially tracking their engagement while they were out of the office.
Work from home
She said despite sharing some of the techniques used by global players outsourcing service jobs, employers still felt they needed to have workers return to office to manage their workers have instant consultations and build team synergies. She said they also cite that most workers are not self-driven.
“We have had consultancies asking question on what employers are doing globally to track worker engagement, set targets but we have a long way to go, we do not have so much of that self-driven culture here,” she said.
Deveint Ltd Managing Director Muraya Kamau said he experimented with hybrid work but decided to recall the entire staff after he noticed workers gave inconsistent performance when they worked from home and the office.
He said that he chose to bring everyone back for fairness since he could not have the strugglers in the office while the rest of the capable staff worked hybrid.
“After working from home for a year we came back with a hybrid system and it was convenient for our workers especially those commuting from far. But after some time it was clear that some people were more productive in the office than at home,” Mr Kamau said.
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Technology failures at home
I asked Mr Kamau, the experienced software technology practitioners, whether the cost of deploying IT systems to support remote work was a consideration and whether that exposed the company to security concerns.
The number of hacking incidents rose 152.9 per cent to 35.2 million between July and September 2020 from 13.9 million in a similar period the previous year according to data from the Communications Authority of Kenya.
But Mr Kamau said they have their servers in the cloud and high-tech security on devices and logins so they had secure systems.
The FKE boss, however, said technology failures at home and the fact that Kenya is not extensively covered with tech infrastructure to facilitate remote work.
“Although Kenya is quite advanced technology there are very many places not entirely covered so you get those timeouts, then there is the noise because you do not have a private place to convert into a home office,” Ms Mugo said.
She said that while most Kenyan firms have resorted to ending remote work, the practice still featured mostly among banks, blue chip companies, IT and multinationals that have outsourced services such as call center jobs.
She said Kenya’ labour force skills and jobs remain very manual requiring physical presence in work areas.
“If you look at the public sector it is fairly manual, a lot of the small business space is also pretty manual, drivers, clerks,” she said.
But the end of remote work is not just in Kenya, a Wall Street Journal report indicated that 72.5 percent of companies had workers operating solely from the office up from 60 percent in 2021. The share of business establishments with hybrid arrangements, where employees split time between home and worksites, decreased in all measured industries in 2022.
