For Mina Lim, Managing Director, Oracle Philippines, a successful remote work program requires several ingredients for success.
“Firstly, an organization needs the right tools. Getting the right technology is a challenge for many companies. To help ensure business continuity, they need to partner with their IT teams and ensure that they use the right software and virtual private networking (VPN) for tools like Zoom, and WebEx,” Lim said.
While maintaining data integrity and privacy of critical business documents, businesses also have to ensure that their employees have the right security software on their machines, helping them mitigate remote data breaches.
“Secondly, building social time is critical. Working from home means missing the impromptu chats with your officemates during breaks. We are somehow losing the human connection that is beneficial in our emotional and mental health status,” Lim said, adding that business leaders should remember that even though spontaneous interactions are gone, they can be replaced by intentional conversations. And so “purposely give time to call each team member at least once a week to sync up.”
Lastly, an organization needs to establish a structure. “This is especially important if employees are working from home for the first time. It is important to make sure employees know the company’s expectations as far as productivity is concerned. Organizations can set weekly or monthly goals together with their employees and discuss their progress at least biweekly. On these calls, make sure to have a schedule and open discussions around projects, brainstorming, or problem-solving. Video conferencing tools like Zoom are helpful for face-to-face time rather than always using the phone.”
Lim said that Oracle Philippines understands “the right tools can help us do the job right. As organizations are forced to adapt and prioritize the health and safety of employees, HR leaders need to help their teams adjust to the change and address these new challenges.”
And so below are some of the Oracle offerings that are helping customers lessen the economic and personal impacts.
Oracle Workforce Health and Safety: Bundled under the Employee Care Package for the New Workplace, which is designed to help HR leaders protect their employees as offices reopen, the Oracle Workforce Health Safety module is provided for free during the pandemic for Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) customers. It helps automate reporting of workplace incidents both now and in the future. It can help companies record employees exposed to the virus, then work backwards two weeks—the incubation period for COVID-19—to notify employees who had been in close contact with the infected workers. The application can also offer recommendations about cleaning communal work areas, ordering protective equipment, and notifying external agencies about exposures.
Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM Analytics: This provides HR professionals with ready-to-use workforce insights to improve their decisions related to workforce diversity, employee attrition and retention, talent acquisition, compensation, and more. Continuing to focus on employee care in this time of the pandemic, Oracle added a “Return to the Workplace Journey” that is designed to help keep employees safe by guiding them through new processes, training, and safety protocols, while enabling HR leaders to analyze critical workforce data such as testing and vaccination records. Oracle Fusion HCM Analytics analyzes the data captured by Return to the Workplace Journey to gain key insights into workforce safety, such as the percentage of their workforce who have been tested or vaccinated, the distribution across multiple offices, and for global companies, how different regions are progressing. This level of insight can allow organizations to use real-time data to make key decisions such as when to allow in-office access, which offices are ready to re-open, and what location-specific protocols need to be implemented to provide the utmost safety of their employees.
“For those customers that aren’t in a position to adopt software cloud modules or want to get more out of their existing on-premises offerings but extend them to the cloud to support the new environment, there is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI),” Lim said. “This is a deep and broad platform of public cloud services that enable organizations to build and run a wide range of applications in a scalable, secure, highly available, and high-performance environment. It has self-repairing and self-optimizing autonomous features that leverage machine learning to automate routine tasks, freeing up more time to build enterprise applications.”
And to help companies move to the cloud, Oracle has introduced several new programs to help simplify the move and maximize the return on investment. These include:
- Oracle Support Rewards program – Like frequent flyer miles, it creates more value for existing Oracle technology customers. As they make new commitments to buy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services, they can earn rewards that reduce or even eliminate their Oracle on-premises technology licensing support bills.
- Oracle Cloud Lift Services give Oracle customers expanded access to technical tools and cloud engineering resources to quickly migrate workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) at no additional cost.
