In recent weeks, anecdotal evidence suggests that towns and cities are getting busier as employees start working more days at the office. Not Bec Boxshall (pictured above), senior account manager with Simplex Insurance Solutions.
“I literally live in the middle of nowhere,” said Boxshall who works remotely five days a week from her home in the Shepparton area of Victoria’s Macedon Ranges.
“I’m on a farm and I’m very rural so if I wanted to go and work in a town, I would have to travel at least half an hour because the towns around me are very small and there aren’t many opportunities for me there,” she said.
Boxshall made the decision with the blessing of her managers well after the COVID-19 lockdowns were over.
“I started working remotely in February this year and it was pretty much because it was so convenient,” said Boxshall. “The balance of life and work for me is massive because I’m not the type of person who can just throw 24 hours, seven days a week into work.”
She enjoys the ability to get “little things done” while still putting in a full day of work.
“Like the washing and stuff like that which had helped free up my weekends,” said Boxshall.
The move home didn’t just offer flexibility. Working from home, she said, was also a career move.
“I can still grow a really great career and not be forgotten out in the countryside,” said Boxshall.
Until now, even post-COVID when hybrid work is the norm, anyone serious about their career would probably assume they needed to spend at least some time physically present in the office. Not so, said Boxshall.
“I think if anything it’s the complete opposite in a way,” she said. “The foundation is having a really good workplace and, in our case, Helen [Stephens, director] and Kay [Jackson, director] are very supportive of every single one of their staff members and if there is anything that we want to do, they will just line the paths for us.”
Boxshall lives in an area where there are no other local insurance brokers, so she made that part of her argument in favour of working remotely full-time for her firm.
“There are no insurance brokers where I live whatsoever and people have to travel at least 30 kilometres each way for a broker, so that’s an untapped market,” said Boxshall.
Another argument in favour of remote work – a ‘go local’ mentality.
“There are big farms, it’s rural, and for people like that there’s a ‘go local’ kind of mentality,” she said. “So for me it seemed like, around here, they need something like this.”
Apart from being more embedded in the community, by working remotely she’s also physically located much closer to her customers.
“If they’ve got me out in the middle of nowhere where there are many untapped clients, it’s only going to benefit the business,” said Boxshall. “The firm already has a presence in Ballarat and Kyneton so this is spreading their name across more of Victoria.”
Today, she said, her firm has the work practices and technology in place to facilitate productive working from home. However, like many companies, COVID-19 lockdowns forced some major adaptations.
“We did have to work from home a little bit during COVID but back then there were no procedures in place and we were really just locked down at home and so we’d pack up our office stuff to use from home,” said Boxshall.
For example, she said, when COVID hit, the firm’s operations were all still paper-based.
“When we all went home to work we had to scan everything through and it would take a good day to actually get everything on the computer,” said Boxshall. “Our firm has now gone completely digital and online - there’s no paper whatsoever.”
She described the pandemic, in terms of its impact on her firm’s business practices, as “a massive positive for us.”
“If COVID hadn’t hit, I think we would still be paper every day, all day,” said Boxshall.
The majority of her colleagues have adapted to a paperless office very smoothly, she said. Boxshall attributes this to the relative youth of her colleagues – most are aged 30 or younger.
“Our lives already revolved around technology and it was a matter of just quickly learning what we had to do on the computers and that was it,” she said.
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