Pandemic triggered move to truly remote workforce

The coronavirus pandemic forced businesses to innovate new ways of managing their workforce, in many cases having employees work from home.

At Norman-based Polston Tax Resolution, that reality led managers to rethink the advantages of hiring workers who may never step foot in the office.

Polston began exploring work- from- home options in the weeks before the pandemic took center stage in American life, just as the virus began spreading across the globe.

"We thought this could be a good opportunity for us to see how our firm could work remotely if everybody did leave the office, and maybe this coronavirus could be a problem," said Rachel Mathew, a partner at the firm.

Polston engaged TeamLogicIT to help move more than 100 employees out of the company's brick-andmortar offices in six states, and into their individual home offices.

Recently, the company hired its first fully remote employee, who will work from their home in Dallas.

"We had never hired an employee sight unseen without that person coming here, us interviewing them, and then training or being able to have a physical office," Mathew said.

Because everyone was already working remotely, it felt like a seamless effort to hire someone far afield. It's also allowed the company to expand its geographic reach now that more clients are using video conference tools like Zoom to conduct tax business.

"That's really opened up that opportunity for us hiring talent now across the country," said Mathew.

It's a trend that's developed in other sectors.

A survey commissioned by Bitglass, a Silicon Valley cloud security company, found that more than half of respondents said the pandemic accelerated migration to the cloud for day-to-day activities.

A staggering 84% expects their companies to support more work- from- home opportunities in the future.

About one-third of those answering the survey said they will consider making some positions permanently remote, with about half unsure whether they will take that step.

Like any business, Polston had to think about the challenges of a remote workforce, especially because its employees handle sensitive tax and legal documents. The solution: Work through the cloud, a term used to describe networked computers that allow remote, secure storage of information.

Polston's employees use their personal computers to connect directly to their work stations in the office, creating a sort of protected bubble, Mathew said.

After hiring the remote employee in Dallas, the company now understands it can handle a remote workforce and the technological needs that come with it.

"That enabled us to see we, for the most part, could stack up 'people' maybe like The Matrix in Oklahoma in terms of hard drives, but those physical people could be anywhere," said Mathew.

Another challenge was the desire to maintain corporate culture. Polston built itself as a face- to- face tax services company. However in one experiment that began a couple of years before the pandemic hit, clients could sit down at a computer and use Zoom to chat with employees in another city.

Those video conference meetings never took off in popularity like Mathew hoped, but the current situation has forced nearly everyone to become familiar with the technology. It's become the norm.

"Now that our reach has expanded, we anticipate exponential growth," she said. "Because now everybody's comfortable with Zoom. Not only do we not have to open a brick-andmortar office, we can just send the link."