Member Article

Virtual key to home-working success at Enterprise

Three years ago we started a home-working pilot with 10 employees. It was successful enough to encourage us to move from pilot to actual programme.

At the time, the only thing that was virtual about our home-working was that our employees were based at home and communicated via telephone and email. They came into the office for their job interviews, had a two week office-based training and onboarding programme and also had regular meetings where home-workers would be expected to come into the office.

Fast forward three years and, whilst our original objectives for launching the programme remain the same, our whole approach to home-working has changed.

The thinking behind the programme was that we knew that home-working would bring us the scope to access more talent and be even more inclusive as a business. Given our core business, the majority of roles at Enterprise Rent-A-Car need to be based in a branch. Whilst we have a network of 400 branches virtually everywhere in the country, for many people it is simply not feasible to travel to a branch every day for work.

So we identified the key opportunity for home-working at our business centre, where the work is all based on telephone and email.

To begin with, a lot of our emphasis was on making sure that home-workers were adequately set up to deliver against their objectives from their home base. They need to work from somewhere with a door that can be closed, and though we understand that people who home-work often juggle their lives, they need be available to work when they say they are.

Over time, our emphasis has shifted to ensure that equally as a business, Enterprise is set up to deliver against the objectives of our home-workers.

So we have created a completely new employee process that is tailored to the needs of these particular employees.

Our starting point has been to recognise that people who choose to home-work do so for a reason. They may not have the flexibility to travel miles for an interview, or to spend prolonged periods travelling in for meetings or training. This doesn’t mean that they are not ambitious or committed to their careers. Quite the contrary. It may simply mean that they live in a remote location. And if we don’t respect these challenges then essentially we are excluding these people from the opportunity.

So we now manage as much as possible remotely and virtually. We now conduct interviews and assess potential candidates by telephone. Whilst it sounds strange to employ someone without meeting them face to face, in reality, this is ideal for assessing the communication skills our business centre employees will actually use. We are not distracted by factors which are completely irrelevant.

After all, the focus is how do you sound on the telephone? Why then would we need to see them? We actually need to hear our employees talk and understand how they will interact with our customers on the telephone.

We experimented at one point using video technology, so that we could see the candidates. But we soon realised that this was actually excluding potential talent who might be excellent over the phone but might not be comfortable talking to a camera.

We now have two virtual trainers and the majority of our development programmes, from onboarding onwards, are conducted remotely. Our networking is also all virtual, and we use messenger apps to keep our home-workers connected and feeling like they are part of a team. We can now use software to run quite complex sessions with breakouts and virtual whiteboards.

There is also a very transparent system for setting goals and measuring deliverables, so that everyone knows what is being achieved and what the targets are. These allow us to track individual and group results, and we know from these metrics that we are experiencing record levels of performance.

Another key area of focus has been building career paths for our home-workers that suit their career objectives. After three years we still have employees who started working with us on the pilot, and this is largely because we’ve created a clear promotion path for them.

All of our home-workers have exactly the same benefits and holidays as our office-based employees. However, we’ve had to create a bespoke career path in order to support their desire to work from home.

We now have 150 home-workers, which is around a quarter of our business centre employee base. Each home-worker has a range of career paths open to him or her and we have regular discussions on how we can help to support their development. There is support for working towards NVQs in management, business administration and areas of finance. Around a quarter of our home-workers are now on apprenticeships, which are performing above the national average for completion.

Our home-workers are also given the option to shift into an office-based role if they wish in order to take up a promotion or a particular position, and there is total fluidity to move from one to the other.

Going virtual has definitely been key to success. The more we take our processes, training and interaction online, the better our metrics perform. Coupled with career development that is tailor-made to employees’ needs, our goal has been to ensure that the choice of work location should have zero impact on the opportunities that people have with Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Janice Clark .