11 Reasons to Enable Healthcare Staff to Work from Home

Not all healthcare employees need to be on-site to complete their work. When you enable healthcare staff to work from home, your employees, organization, and community will benefit!

Here are 11 reasons why you should implement solutions that enable healthcare staff to work from home:

1.) Limit the number of people on site – the COVID-19 crisis has caused numerous organizations to reassess how many employees are actually necessary to keep on site. Moving workers off site now will help protect patients and employees from the current coronavirus; and, it will establish a more proactive approach for any future public health emergencies by ensuring staff who can work from home are already set up to do so when another new disease strikes.

2.) Maintain HIPAA Compliance – the healthcare industry has been reluctant to offer remote work opportunities due to concerns over PHI security. HealthWare’s remote work solutions enable healthcare staff to work from home by providing controlled access to PHI, encryption of all information at all times, complete audit trails, and full transparency for management.

3.) Increase productivity – many studies demonstrate the positive effects of working from home on productivity. For example, a Stanford paper reported a 13% performance increase when employees switched to remote work and Airtasker’s survey of 1,004 full-time employees found that on average, remote workers put in 1.4 more days of work each month (16.8 more days each year) than those working in an office. Plus, remote work has the potential to facilitate a more flexible schedule, so many remote workers can choose to accomplish some of their work outside of the typical “9 to 5” business hours if they feel more motivated in the early morning or late at night, with the result of producing higher quality work. (Our remote work solutions provide management with productivity monitoring for real-time oversight, so you can really be certain your remote workers are delivering.)

4.) Expand your pool of job applicants – if your employees can work from home, you aren’t limited to hiring workers who live within commuting distance of your facilities.

5.) Recruit top talent – in addition to more potential candidates, you’ll also attract the best contenders. According to Indeed’s 2018 survey, an organization’s remote work policy is an important factor for 47% of employees in their job search and 40% would even consider taking a pay cut if it meant they could work from home. And if you can offer a work-from-home incentive, you’ll especially appeal to Gen Z and Millennial healthcare employees who have joined or are entering the workforce at a time when remote work opportunities are increasingly common.

6.) Reduce your footprint – commuting and company offices are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Moving some of your healthcare staff off-site will make a significantly positive environmental impact. These remote workers’ homes will double as their office space and they will travel fewer miles, use less gas and oil, and reduce their contributions to air pollution.

7.) Keep workers healthy – working remotely means your teams won’t be exposed to workplace (or public transportation) germs. This is especially enticing for employees who work in the healthcare field and would otherwise be vulnerable to germs from both colleagues and ailing patients. On top of the physical health advantages, remote workers experience mental health benefits related to stress (e.g. no commute/traffic, more free time, better work/life balance). Physically and mentally healthy employees can better concentrate to produce superior work.

8.) Decrease sick days and absences – employees are not only less vulnerable to getting sick in the first place when they work remotely, but they’re also more apt to work through a mild cold or sickness if they can do so in the comfort of their own home. The reason some employees may choose to call in when sick is not because they don’t feel up to working, but simply to avoid spreading the illness to their coworkers – a concern that remote workers don’t have to worry about!

9.) Improve employee satisfaction and retention – employees who enjoy the perks of remote work will be more satisfied, more loyal to your organization, and less inclined to leave their positions.

10.) Save money – cost savings come in the form of less office space/equipment/supplies, reduced turnover, fewer absences, increased productivity, and recruitment of better talent, to name just a few areas in which you’ll see major returns on investment. (We estimate savings of $10,000 per year per worker when you employ our remote work solutions.)

11.) Remote work is the future – between 2005 and 2017, remote work increased by 159% in the United States. A recent study projects that 73% of all teams will include remote workers by 2028.

The time has come to embrace work-from-home solutions to remain competitive in the eyes of prospective employees – you simply can’t afford to resist this inevitable change to the workforce.

Remote Work Solutions for Healthcare

Which parts of your operation would you move off-site if you could? HealthWare Systems can analyze your paper and fax-based workflows and offer alternative solutions that enable healthcare staff to work from home in a HIPAA-compliant, secure environment.

Schedule a phone consultation and we’ll help you determine how you can enable healthcare staff to work from home, and which departments to target, so you can start reaping the benefits listed above as soon as possible.