“What great news!” says CEO Andrew Lawton,”It is great that the team’s hard work, experience and continuous innovation are being recognised”.

First introduced as a response to the changed world of work resulting from the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic, ResKube provides a simple, cost effective, single device to provide high value or critical homeworkers with enterprise grade power and secure communications resilience.

The innovative range of products and services significantly reduces the risk of power or communications interruptions or cybersecurity breaches causing financial, operational or brand impact to the delivery of business services carried out by remote workers.

Interruptions to power and broadband occur much more frequently in the UK and Europe than many believe and the impact to key workers, their customers and the enterprise can be damaging and long-lasting.

This is especially in the case when homeworkers either undertake time-critical work such as trading, live broadcasting, providing essential customer services or deal with sensitive and confidential data, as staff are more vulnerable to attacks from hackers penetrating their often-insecure home networks.

ResKube has received an overwhelmingly positive response from Customers and the industry that it is designed to help – ensuring key workers stay always on.

Reskube and the BCI are publishing their Global Survey report on the 8^th September with an accompanying webinar explaining the results on the same day.

The global report outlining the many lessons learned in the very unusual early months of 2020 is, arguably, one of the most important reviews of Business Continuity and Organisational Resilience in many years. Reskube is pleased to be partnering with the BCI to deliver this valuable information.

A further webinar as part of BCI Education Month, with representatives from JPMC and Morgan Stanley, along with the Reskube CEO, that delves specifically into the results relating to the changes in workplace resilience in the light of changes in working practices will be held on the 10th September.

The report shows how Business Continuity, Crisis Management and the wider subject of Organisational Resilience are intertwined but different. It looks at the way in which we view these disciplines, how we should review our processes and the way in which we organise our businesses to make their output as effective as possible.

2020 has been a surprising year and not all were fully prepared for the pandemic and the changes in our way of working that resulted. However, we have seen that organisations with flexible, adaptable plans fared better than others, clearly demonstrating the competitive advantage of continuity planning.

The survey contributors felt that we only had a short time, six months, to make improvements in the way we plan before the focus of our Boards move on to other things.

A key decision is the appropriate reporting line for BC and Organisational Resilience and how to ensure relevant representation at board level. Many hoped for a Chief Resilience Officer. Time will tell how achievable this is.

This is the second time we have looked back at the pandemic.

The first time around we thought we had learned the lessons to adapt to the way the world had changed. This report shows us, a year further on and still in the grips of the pandemic, that the world and our profession within it has changed yet further.

We are very pleased to be partnering with the BCI to deliver this report on a global survey charting this change and our response as professionals and as organisations.

The pandemic has affected us for much longer than we were anticipating when we first ran this survey. We can now see that many of the changes to the way we work and to how we run our organisations will remain with us into the future.

This report shows that, as a consequence of the benefits seen over the past 18 months, there is now a greater appreciation of Business Continuity at board level and more widely in our organisations. However, some of the anticipated cross-silo collaborations have yet to materialise. Business Continuity has been given a more strategic position in management minds, however, and is seen as a competitive advantage.

The past year has seen the temporary shift to homeworking become fixed in our psyches. A McKinsey Study – Reimagine Work – showed that most people wanted to continue working from home for 3 days a week after the pandemic. A further survey by EY in April 2021 showed that nine in ten respondents want flexibility in where and when they work and 54% will consider moving job if they are not given it.

This move to hybrid working has meant that we, as service providers, have had to adapt fast.

For example, this report shows how many were frustrated with restrictions in the Work Area Recovery (WAR) services that prevented their use for split working. These restrictions were necessary to manage customers’ service risk but did not take the pandemic scenario into account. We need to develop more flexible services for the future.

The respondents in the report have asked us to innovate and develop relevant and flexible WAR services that assist at times of cyber-attack. We are also asked to develop services that help provide resilience to homeworking staff.

Aside from pandemic and cyber-attack, natural disasters feature prominently in our minds, because of the multitude of major storm, extreme heat, extreme cold and wildfire events that we have seen in recent months.

However, these dramatic and devastating events are thankfully rare. We must build resilience to cope with the daily interruptions to power and to communications that more frequently affect our newly hybrid workforce.

As infrastructure is adapted to support the hybrid worker, security and resilience provisions must be integral to our daily operations to reduce our organisational risk.

The UK is seen to deliver relatively stable power and internet to homes. However, a USwitch report published in July showed that 14.8 million UK homes were interrupted by a significant loss of internet, often caused by power cut, over the preceding year. This had an estimated impact of £5 billion loss to UK businesses. These events, along with the on average 80 major power cuts every day across the country, demonstrate that we still need to consider our critical homeworkers resilience.

This report shows that 52.7% of respondents have not yet begun looking at homeworker resilience but will do soon.

Some are using the office as fallback for the homeworker, flipping the old ways on their head. This is “disaster recovery” provision rather than true resilience, however.

As ResKube, we find that 5-10% of homeworking staff fall into a category that requires true power and communications resilience in the home. This is to ensure that critical work or decision-making are not interrupted and that time critical work is completed on schedule. It is for these employees that we have developed the ResKube solution.

I hope that you find this report a valuable insight into the views of your industry peers from around the world, giving you an understanding of the key lessons learned from yet another eventful year.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, every company had to make a Digital Transformation almost literally overnight. Now, our production offices are in every employee home and we have found that it works well for the company, and for most employees.

However, according to the “Homeworker Wellbeing Survey” carried out by the Institute of Employment Studies in April 2020, just two weeks into lockdown, the cracks were already showing. Various physical health problems were being reported, with nearly 60% of respondents reporting neck pains/aches and leg pains.

ACAS advice states that employers and employees should be practical, flexible, and sensitive to each other’s situation when working from home because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Employers have a duty of care to their employees and should:

• 1. talk to their employees and workers about how they might improve working from home arrangements
• 2. continue to consider which roles and tasks can be done from home – this might involve doing things differently and not assuming a role cannot be based at home
• 3. support employees to adjust to remote working
• consider individual employees’ needs, for example anyone with childcare responsibilities, a long-term health condition or a disability
• 4. write down the arrangements that have been agreed so that everyone is clear

By law, employers are responsible for the health and safety of all employees, including those working from home. During the coronavirus pandemic, it is very unlikely that employers can carry out usual health and safety risk assessments at an employee’s home. However, an employer should still check that:

• 1. each employee feels the work they are being asked to do at home can be done safely
• 2. employees have the right equipment to work safely
• 3. managers keep in regular contact with their employees, including making sure they do not feel isolated
• 4. reasonable adjustments are made for an employee who has a disability

If changes are needed, employers are responsible for making sure they happen.

Employees also have a responsibility to take reasonable care of their own health and safety. Anyone working from home should keep in regular contact with their manager. They should also tell their manager about any health and safety risks and any homeworking arrangements that need to change.

With more people working from home, employers are seeking answers to critical questions to ensure they are adhering to legislation. At FortressAS we have released “The Definitive Home Working FAQ: Your Critical Home-Working Questions Answered” which covers the answers to some of the most important and pressing questions employers have today about their employee’s homeworking arrangements.