Inventions Related to Remote Work

Work from Home Innovations – Boosting Productivity

The oft-associated stigma of an employee working from home is that he or she will spend more time sitting on the couch than actually getting real work done for the employer’s benefit.  And that has been a concern for employers that are used to supervising employee workload in an office environment.  Employers often perceive the office environment as providing a certain degree of control over employee work that could not previously be reproduced in a remote environment, such as work-from-home.  Whether it be ensuring that employees are actually performing work duties during work hours, or ensuring that employees are producing work product that meets the quality control put into place by the employer, a physical office environment logically seems to be a better fit for managing employee work performance.  After all, since the employer is paying the employee, shouldn’t the employer have the right to manage that employee during work hours?

However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, employers have had to rethink the way they operate.  Supervising all of their employees in a physical location has become infeasible, largely as a result of government regulations and health concerns.  To maintain some modicum of supervision, employers are starting to turn to their only viable solution: technology.  By focusing on different technological solutions to monitor work activity, employers are finding ways to operate according to a new normal.

Patent Ingenuity is a patent law firm with a focus on technology patents, specifically software patents.  In particular, the firm can have a registered USPTO patent attorney work with an employer to protect the innovations that allow the employer to boost productivity in a remote work environment.

Innovations that also boost Employee Morale

As with most workplace environments, keeping employees content is critical for organizational stability and growth – and a remote work environment is no different.  Employers leveraging technological solutions are now faced with the challenge of developing worker comradery through a computer screen.  

And employees, themselves, have legitimate concerns about working from home.  In particular, employer technological solutions may raise certain privacy concerns that would not be present in a physical work environment.  For instance, work-from-home monitoring solutions may be more expansive in a virtual work environment than in a physical work environment.

This is another instance where Patent Ingenuity can provide legal counsel to employers.  A qualified patent lawyer can help advise executives within your organization as to how to protect innovations that provide a sufficient balance between boosting employee productivity and employee morale.

Ownership of Employee Inventions in a Work-from-Home Environment

One issue that may impact the new work-from-home situation is what to do when intellectual property is created by an employee in the course of their employment while working from home. Generally, employment contracts include clauses to cover the invention of new ideas or concepts during working hours. However, it can be harder to establish when an idea was developed during a more flexible work-from-home schedule in an environment other than a physical environment operated by an employer. This is an especially relevant concern when employees use their personal devices (cellphones, tablets, laptop computers etc.) to perform company work. Is your employee using company network infrastructure for remote work? This may help a company to assert ownership, as well protect the company’s trade secret information and other confidential information.

Patent Attorney For Remote Work Inventions

Patent Ingenuity offers assistance to funded startups, as well as small and medium-sized tech companies looking to obtain software patents. The Firm also offers its unique Patent Concierge Service, an advisory service which helps a company through the formative stages of tech development to ensure that it is abiding by intellectual property best practices. Contact Patent Ingenuity to see what the Firm can do to help build your company’s patent portfolio.