Pre-2020, remote work was something few companies have implemented into their workspace. It was not widely popular until the COVID-19 pandemic when the whole country (and world!) went on lockdown, forcing companies to allow employees to work from home. Five years later, remote work is more common than ever with most companies implementing a WFH (work from home) work style. With WFM becoming more popular, it forced the federal government to reshape procedures and regulations to allow contractors to have a WFM address. This affected SAM’s entity validation process, creating a different process to the registration.
Policy Compliance
With the rise of remote work also comes with the concern of keeping sensitive data in a secure location. Federal contracting comes with a lot of sensitive. data from companies like EIN, banking information, employee/employer SSN, and much more. Keeping compliance with regulations is very important with dealing with sensitive data. This can also include data from government projects with other companies tied to it. Having a good cybersecurity system set-up will help you remain compliant with those regulations. Another way would be to use VPN that can help secure your IP and ensure extra security when working with federal agencies and other federal contractors.
Modification of Contracts
Remote work can also call for contract modifications. What this means is a contract writer or federal agency will have to modify the contract to allow for remote work or “work from home” guidelines if a contractor require that. You want to ensure that you speak to a contracting officer about remote work so they are kept in the loop and make any adjustments they may need to for a contract. With so many companies and individuals allowing work from home positions, the future of remote work may be implemented more in the future. Be sure to keep up with GSA, SAM, SBA, and any other federal organization that oversees federal contracting. They will be the best resource to find out about remote work regulations, if it’s allowed, and what those parameters are.
WFH Technology
In 2020 when the pandemic hit the United Sates and enforcing a nation-wide shutdown, came the rise of Zoom. This tool proved to be extremely useful for businesses, schools, and families across the nation to easily communicate with others while being able to see each other. Zoom, to this day, remains a major help in businesses with WFH employees. Of course, many other resources like Zoom are available like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and many more. Utilizing remote video conference tools can be extremely beneficial for individuals and companies and can be used in federal contracting as well. Here at FEDCON, our Advisors use Zoom to to give their Market Assessment presentations to potential clients of ours. It gives potential clients an opportunity to see our Advisors as well as be shown federal contracting opportunities by sharing screens.
Budget and Cost
An additional benefit from impelementing remote work is reduced costs on items that would have been more if someone where to work in an office. Things like gas, office space rent, travel expenses and more all would be reduced if an individual or company worked from home. With costs being lowered due to remote work, some federal contracting officers might find this favorable and impact future federal contract negotiations.
Another positive budget cost for remote work would be a wide range of applicants. Because you’d be hiring remote, you have access to not just applicants in your area, but all over the nation. This gives applicants a chance to show off their skills and why you should hire them even if they live halfway across the country. Contracting officers will appreciate this, knowing you value your company and its integrity by hiring the best of the best candidates to work from home.
However, there are downsides to the budget when it comes to remote work. More costs might have to be spent on business-sized subscriptions for office-related material like cloud storage. Additionally, employees may need laptops and/or computers to do their work which would affect shipping costs as well as IT hardware. While employees save money on gas, it may also be a burden on the company to fly out an employee for a meeting or event.
Future Trends with Remote Work
Up until the new administration took office, federal agencies allowed for remote and hybrid work. Two departments, GSA and the DoD (Department of Defense) infamously implemented hybrid work into their environment. However, President Trump dismantled this in January forcing all hybrid and remote federal government employees to return to on-site work. While this may be a set back in the future of remote work, the future is still in front of us and we never know what is going to happen.
Conclusion
With remote work on the rise, it’s important to follow any regulations set forth my government agencies and contracting officers. Additionally, learning and implementing technology that could be useful for remote work is extremely important. Communication is key with remote work, so having a system in place that ensures that efficiently will be extremely beneficial for federal contracting. Be wary of budget and costs as well, while there are upsides (cost-wise) to remote work, you want to ensure you factor in the negatives of that as well and budget for any and all roadblocks or obstacles.
If you’d like to know more about FEDCON and what were about, do not hesitate to give the rest of our site a look. Additionally, if you have any question, please reach out to our help desk at 855-233-3266 and someone would be happy to help you!
