Impact on company due to WFH

Solar previous experiences with WFH are minimal, as only a small scale of employees was WFH prior to the pandemic. However, the lockdown forced Solar to heavily increase the amount of office workers WFH to 80-90% during the pandemic (Henrik Thystrup, 24:52 - 29:11).

During the interview Thystrup mentioned efficiency as one the impacts during WFH. He stated that people at the beginning needed to adapt to a new way of cooperating, as collaboration happens in the digital world instead of in the office. Solar therefore experienced an efficiency drop in the beginning of the pandemic, but once the employees got familiar with the digital environment and new software, a higher efficiency level was established.

It's probably higher now than it was. Of course, there are some collaborations where you can just go to a person and stand in front of a whiteboard and make some drawings, that's something that is a little bit more difficult. But you can do that using Teams or call people, I think people have adjusted. There was maybe a small drop in the beginning, but I think now it's at least as good as it was before. (Henrik Thystrup, 31:29)

Page 98 of 132 According to Thystrup, the WFH phenomenon did not have a significant impact on Solar, this was mainly because the employee already had the technical skills and the infrastructure in place to start WFH. Only a few employees had minor problems at the beginning, but most of the employees did not experience any problems with the transition. (Henrik Thystrup, 27:09). Because solving the work assignments at home required the same technical skills as in the office. “I think most of the people have the benefit, because the setup we have and (…) there was no real difference working from home or working in the office. From a technical point of view.” (Henrik Thystrup, 25:31). Thystrup further described the minimal impact with WFH by explaining the use of Citrix which made it easier for the employees to adapt. Citrix enables employees to perform the same task outside the office.

When we made our lockdown in all the different countries we are in, people could just continue work because we're using Citrix. So, people just work from home. So, there was no difference. The only thing was that they needed to go to their own refrigerator to get food and not into the canteen get her food. So that was different. (Henrik Thystrup, 26:07)

Overall, Solar has made small improvements in their human IT capabilities. Those employees who initially did not have the technical skills to start WFH, have now adapted to this phenomenon, as the efficiency level is higher compared to the beginning of the pandemic.

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Arkil

Arkil is one of Denmark's leading construction companies with more than 80 years of expertise. Arkil carries out a large number of versatile construction projects across the entire country, and are currently cooperating with Vejdirektoratet, BaneDanmark, and other large utility companies. The majority of the company's 2000 employees are operating at construction sites with a small number of white-collar employees at offices (Arkil Holding A/S, n.d.).

Jens Skjøt-Arkil the owner and CFO at Arkil could only participate for half an hour in the interview.

In order to adapt to the limited time available, it was decided to only use the part concerning the impact of WFH from the interview guide. This analysis part is thus structured a bit differently than the others. Here the focus will solely be on the impact of WFH in Arkil. It should be added that most of the employees at Arkil work on construction sites and do not have the possibility of WFH. Skjøt-Arkil estimated that around half of the employees whose tasks were suited for remote work, were WFH at the time of the interview (Jens Skjøt-Arkil, 03:06).

Going into the lockdown only a small portion of the employees were already used to WFH. As a result of this, many of the employees did not initially have the required skills to fully utilize their software, in order to be effective when WFH (Jens Skjøt-Arkil, 00:55). This improved over the year as the situation became a new normal. One of the reasons behind the increased success over time was due to the focus on educating the staff. “We did have some educational sessions to teach people how to use Microsoft Teams and how to use it more frequently.” (Jens Skjøt-Arkil, 02:51). This initiative helped the company to develop the necessary IT capabilities required for effective use of the central software in their WFH solution. Additionally, they also invested capital into new hardware in order to facilitate remote work. “(...) and also, on the IT side, made sure that people have the things they need: headphones, access to cameras, and the infrastructure.” (Jens Skjøt-Arkil, 01:48).

When asked about if they had the infrastructure needed for this change, Skjøt-Arkil answered:

“Yeah, we did. Luckily, we started last year to the year before last year to implement Microsoft Teams, so we were quite ready for that.” (Jens Skjøt-Arkil, 02:10). Later in the interview Skjøt-Arkil

Page 100 of 132 explained that they were already in the progress of enhancing their digital capabilities, and that the external shock of government regulations served as a burning platform to further push this strategy.

I don't really think there was anything that was very surprising, of course, the need to instruct people on how it works is always a barrier but actually, it's been more an opportunity to actually teach people how to do stuff we have. We had it on our agenda to improve our online working skills. That was one of the strategic targets and we were really helped by this burning platform to actually get it implemented a lot quicker than we were hoping, so it's actually been more of a help than an issue in that regard. (Jens Skjøt-Arkil, 04:06)

In summary Arkil used this crisis to quickly adapt to the new working conditions by furthering their already in place IT strategy. In more concrete terms, they invested into human IT capabilities through training and tangible IT capabilities in the form of the equipment needed for professional online collaboration.

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