Even before the ongoing pandemic, there was a steady increase in remote work trends and companies had begun to embrace flexible workplace models. Now, COVID-19 has forced even remote-averse sectors like Banking & Financial Services (BFS) to shift their workplace landscape to a mostly work from home (WFH) environment. The business/logistical implications notwithstanding, WFH has come to be accepted as the new normal.
A Workplace Pushed into Uncertainty
This sudden shift to WFH has left many BFS companies struggling to identify WFH suitability for talent across business functions and job clusters. This means analyzing the WFH-readiness of different employees/roles across job families in the BFS sector.
Draup understands this critical issue and recognized the importance of an intelligent, data-backed, WFH-readiness framework.
Our framework, aptly called Work From Home Capability Index, provides workforce planning stakeholders with a Work From Home Capability Dashboard for all job families and the job roles that come under them.
Based on the score assigned to each role on the dashboard, one can easily identify WFH-suitability and plan their workforce accordingly
An Intelligent Framework to Deal with the Chaos
Draup analyzed 10K+ job descriptions in the BFS sector based on three critical parameters:
i.) People Needs & Tasks: Analysis of workloads and industry data to identify people dependence, supervision, and collaboration needs.
ii.) System Needs: Analysis of workloads and skill requirement data to identify systems dependence and remote working infrastructure availability.
iii.) Compliance Needs: Analysis of responsibilities to identify role-specific corporate compliance needs such as data security, information confidentiality etc.
The result is a quantitative framework that provides a Work From Home Capability Index on a scale from 1 (least optimal for WFH) to 10 (most optimal for WFH).
The Framework in Action
For the job role of “Tax Advisor” in the “Tax” job family, the Capability index is 8.1, implying that the role is highly optimal for WFH. So, this role can be safely termed as “location-agnostic.”
Identifying such roles that can be performed from any location is a crucial factor given the current workforce scenario. This rise in location-agnostic roles also points to a steady increase in the emergence of micro hubs mushrooming around the world.
Micro Hubs: The Future of Remote Work?
Apart from having the benefit of a lower operational cost, micro hubs are also acting as last-mile support infrastructure for employees who have left to WFH from their native locations, i.e., reverse migration.
A recent report from an industry observer also noted that the pandemic is likely to cause a permanent increase in remote working even after the crisis.
Decentralized operations with micro hubs provide enterprises with the advantages of:
- Low cost of office operations
- Access to diverse talent
- Contingency for business continuation
- Location-based wages for talent
- Proximity to (reverse)migrated talent
- Speed of Operations scalability
Identify & Build your Ideal Micro Hub
We identified and rated potential micro hubs based on features like cost of living, gender/ethnic diversity, real estate cost etc. Our report also provides distribution insights on Core and Tech talent availability for the hub.
For BFS, based on the above metrics, we identified Krakow, Poland to be an important emerging micro hub. Krakow has a total BFS talent pool of 8000, out of which 2800 are in BFS tech-related talents. Krakow also has a healthy peer competition ensuring a steady supply of talent and competitive salary trends.
Draup’s WFH Capability Index framework is helping enterprises identify critical, location-agnostic job roles and providing recruiters with much-needed guidance on micro-hubs to hire for these roles.