Among all the craziness in the world today with COVID-19/Coronavirus, many people are now being asked, and in some instances forced, to work from home. While many of the larger companies were prepared for this as they already support working from home, it appears to me that many businesses were caught off-guard and were not immediately able to let their employees work from home. This makes me wonder… is this pandemic forcing businesses to do what should have already been done and encourage a global culture shift and accelerate the move to remote working?
I may be oversimplifying the matter, but it has seemed quite clear to me that the world has been slowly moving toward remote working for a while for a multitude of reasons. Some of the key benefits of remote working in my mind are:
- Reduced real estate costs
- Not everyone will be able to work from home all the time, but if even 25% of your workforce can be remote at any given time, you can downsize your office.
- Reduce carbon footprint
- Not only by reducing real estate but by not having everyone commute to and from the office every day.
- Allow sick employees to work remotely
- Not only prevents the spread of illness but means the employee can still work rather than take sick leave.
- Increased Productivity
- One Chinese study found a 13% increase in productivity for remote workers.
There are many other benefits, but these reasons alone make it a no-brainer to me, I witness all too often companies not supporting or providing the tools to work from home.
Along comes COVID-19…
What I have seen during this pandemic is companies scrambling to provide some mechanism for their employees to be able to work remotely or risk having to close altogether. Whether this be putting in a VPN to access company resources or quickly implementing some form of conferencing and collaboration platform such as Teams or Slack.
I have been quite surprised how many businesses were not already providing these capabilities, but COVID-19 is forcing their hand. IT departments are providing the tools necessary to allow employees to continue their jobs away from the office. Employers are learning how to manage a workforce remotely and ensure work is being done in an effective way. Employees are learning how to work from home and collaborate with their colleagues remotely. All these things are what cause the transition to remote working to move a glacial pace, but that has all been hugely accelerated due to this pandemic.
It may be controversial to see good in this pandemic, but I genuinely believe this will be a good thing long-term and will create a culture-shift in our global workforce – or at least I hope! The real question is will companies who weren’t already doing so start to support and maybe even encourage remote working and will it last?
If you’re new to working from home I have written my 3 Tips to Survive Working from Home to try and help you with the change.
