Tag: remote working

With the sudden emergence of COVID-19, companies once hesitant to embrace remote working arrangements have been forced to allow employees to operate from home. The results have been surprisingly positive, leaving some organisations to wonder why they didn’t do it sooner.

Internet access has come a long way from the R28,000 it cost for a 256kbps connection in 1995. Even prior to the lockdown, almost 500,000 homes and more than 114,000 business premises were connected to fibre according to FTTX Council research from the end of June 2019. Of course, having high-speed access does not necessarily solve all problems.

After working from home and collaborating at a distance, the importance of the workplace and all that it offers has become clear: An office is more than just a place to work and while some people have adapted to working from home (WFH), many people miss the office, perhaps even surprising themselves.

The global Coronavirus pandemic has led to a cataclysmic shift in the way that many organisations do business. With mandatory nation-wide lockdowns, organisations have had no choice but to allow workers to work from home. These drastic changes in ways of working have led to several new cyber security risks and threats.

COVID-19 continues to re-define the way we live and work. Over the past few months, organisations have had to re-imagine the way they work and embrace a fundamentally different approach to operating in this ‘new normal’. Remote working at the current scale became a necessity, and for the most part, it has worked.

Technology has permeated all facets of business. Today, it has become less about the bits and bytes and more about unlocking the efficiency of processes, improving the customer experience, and better understanding data to deliver on the company strategy.

April 2020 marked loadshedding’s 12th anniversary. No one cheered and barely anyone noticed. In fact, within those 12 years, the vast majority of South Africans have accepted loadshedding as a disruption that is not going anywhere any time soon.

An interview with Darren Olivier, Partner Adams & Adams, and Dr Ivor Blumenthal, CEO, ArkKonsult, discussing the legal implications of remote working with respect to an organisation's intellectual property.

This has been a year of disruption, confusion and now a new ‘normal’. COVID-19 is here for the foreseeable future, and that means humans need to adapt to new circumstances like Working from Home (WFH). Almost every industry has embraced this as an effective way of keeping staff safe, remaining operational and controlling costs during global economic downturn.

If one accepts that innovation is crucial to business sustainability especially in the disruption era in which we live, there appears to be a need to better explain the purpose of intellectual property and how these rights together with workplace policies on performance can assist businesses adapt and compete.