Industry players differ on benefit of remote work arrangement
By Oghale Mafuru
As the remote work arrangement gains momentum, experts in the Integrated Marketing Communication Industry have expressed divergent views on the impact it has on businesses.
Speaking on her LinkedIn page, the COO of SO& U, Biodun Adefila said working remotely for advertising agencies is not entirely without some setbacks.
She asserted that the brand managers could coordinate the activities among agencies, clients and the creative team comprising the writers, art directors, illustrators, 3-D artistes, etc while developing the concepts, crafting the messages, illustrating and ensuring that there is a great product to sell to clients. She, however, decried the fact that working from home could lead to creatives working on competing brands without knowing.
In her words: “The challenge with this, apart from the fact that a creative can ignore your calls at the most crucial times, is that a creative may be working for two or more agencies at the same time and they’ll never know. The danger is not just that the creative may be overwhelmed and may therefore not deliver to optimum capacity for any of the clients, he may actually be working on and for competing brands.”
She added: “This is a difficult one for the advertising companies and certainly for the clients who insist on signing non-disclosure agreements.”
On his part, the Managing Director of Starcom Media Perspectives, Jude Odia said remote working has gained acceptance by most businesses due to its flexibility, cost effectiveness, and increase in production output.
Describing the remote working arrangement as the new reality for a post COVID-19 business environment, Mr. Odia said: “It has been an eye-opener. I think it is more efficient and cost effective from the operational point of view. The numbers do better too. Then people feel safer when they don’t have to plunge into the road everyday as much as it is clear what you have to achieve everyday and they are achieving it”.
Commenting on the impact of working remotely for manufacturing businesses, the Shopper/Customer Manager at Beiersdorf Nivea, Kayoda Faizal said remote working impacted significantly on production output, as it is recording a decline.
In his words: “We needed people to work in the factory. Working remotely cut down on our output. We cannot have the usual number of persons working in the factory due to the pandemic and the need to enforce social distance.”
He noted that for the manufacturing industry, working remotely is not the ideal work arrangement.
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