Why Remote Working Will Be The New Normal, Even After Covid

The collective reclaiming of commutes and repurposing of time has the potential to create an unprecedented amount of positive societal change. While going remote has many advantages and opens new opportunities, we should keep in mind that it also comes with challenges. The shift to working remotely may come naturally to some, yet for many it is challenging, and new ways of working have to be learned. We should pay close attention to these differences and work towards a successful integration of remote work frameworks into a productive and sustainable future.

The figure is expected to rise in the future, reaching 43% of the American workforce in the coming year. Our survey shows that employees still don’t feel fully prepared to work remotely. About half feel that they’re still lacking access to all the right resources and tools they need to be productive, as well as the proper training to use work management software. Expectations around productivity and availability are still unclear, but employees have been mostly briefed on the state of their business amid COVID-19. Technological innovation moves at a breakneck pace, and we’ve already seen substantial changes to the way we work over the last decade or so. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses and other organizations around the world have been forced to make rapid changes simply to keep going. The sudden rise of remote work – which has already established itself as a key part of our ‘new normal’ – bears testament to this.

Having Shifted To Remote Work, More Businesses Are Considering A Future With Lower

Surround yourself with people who have been down the lane you want to go; who have made all the mistakes and are now successful. If you have been working-from-home, not from the cubicle few days a month, you feel that sometimes things may go wrong. Fear of unexpected changes in the environment causes collaboration delays, fatal miscommunications, and loss of productivity. All you need is to learn how to weed this out and make it work seamlessly. During the entire history of humankind, location dependency was the key if you wanted to get a job. Working from home was not even a possibility and proximity was the key to productivity. Get a heads up every time I publish something new by subscribing to my newsletter.

Remote Work Means A New Era Of Professionalism

Instead, I foresee businesses adopting lower-cost models that provide agency to their employees in how and where they work. In addition, a survey of business executives from PwC found that 89 percent expect “many” or “most” https://remotemode.com/ employees to work remotely one or more days per week post-pandemic. This will create new challenges in the workplace as businesses adapt their offices to a hybrid model that can accommodate these changing preferences.

A true autonomous culture requires full flexibility in time, presence and they way people work. Companies need to work on autonomy to be succesful as a tech company. Interestingly, 84% of respondents told us that, most of the time, they’re working from home. A much smaller percentage of remote workers primarily work from coworking spaces (8%), coffee shops (4%), libraries (0.5%) https://remotemode.com/blog/whats-the-future-of-remote-working/ and other places (3%) including five RV campers, hotels, offices, and a grandma’s basement. Vacation practices vastly vary by organization, by country, and by culture. Looking at how much vacation time remote workers are offered by their company each year, the most popular response to this question revealed that 32% of remote workers actually get unlimited vacation.

Businesses that can tap into these new attitudes and champion their employees’ interests won’t need to build the biggest and best office to attract and retain talent. As factors like family, community, charitable work, and environmental sustainability become increasingly important to employees, they will expect businesses to develop work environments and programs that support these interests. Even in the past few months, plans have been hatched, ground broken, and rent paid for massive corporate campuses and office buildings in some of the most expensive cities in the world. And for the biggest companies, this strategy could still work, luring talent from suburbs and small towns with the promise of opportunity and big-city living. Virtually all businesses include at least some employees who can reasonably do their jobs where they live. And while a sales and support role may be better suited to shift to remote work than, say, a factory-line worker, technology constantly enables new opportunities. By decentralizing the workforce, companies can attract talent anywhere in the world.

Notably, because the flexibility that remote work offers occasionally means that remote workers can work while traveling and don’t necessarily need to take vacation time to travel. Walking the dogs instead of commuting, that mid-morning gym session, the freedom to catch up with friends and not having to schedule time off for appointments. These are just some of the ways remote workers can enjoy a flexible schedule. Forty percent of respondents rate this is the biggest benefit of remote work. The State of Remote Work is Buffer’s annual report that showcases the world of remote workers and seeks to understand them. Few companies can provide a state-of-the-art facility in a dynamic American city while paying their employees enough to support a high cost of living. But this ideal could be fading as remote work shifts the values of employees.

Additionally, while distractions at home may always be a problem to some extent, during COVID-19, the widespread closing of schools and restrictions on bringing help into the home has almost certainly exacerbated this. For the vast majority of businesses, this drastic shift to remote teams is a new experiment thatrepresents a very different way of working. Face-to-face meetings have been replaced byvideo-chats and popping by someone’s desk or office has been replaced by a quick Slackmessage. The results suggest that the remote work experiment has gone better than expected for hiringmanagers. The perceived benefits of working remotely are causing businesses to significantlyincrease plans for remote hiring in the future, which will cause an acceleration in the alreadyupward trend of greater remote work.

These are the fastest growing, most prevalent groups in the workforce today, which means it’s not a sentiment to take lightly. In fact, it can be argued that younger workers are dramatically changing the way we work, based on the current and projections on the future of remote working. At the time of high uncertainty, the job evolution is the only thing that looks predictable. In our new round-up, we collected 5 top experts opinions on what the future of remote work will look like.

Great Companies Need Great People That’s Where We Come In.

Designing, perhaps you’d be at home with a range of tools at your disposal. Balancing both remote workers and in-office workers is a reality for more and more businesses.

This is consistent with the experiences we’ve seen in our Remoters interviews -in which remote based professionals and organizations share their journey- as well as feedback we’ve received from the remote based community. GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com datashows that regular work-at-home, among the non-self-employed population, has grown by 173% since 2005, 11% faster than the rest of the workforce. Telecommuting in the US has seen a 115% increase in the past decade. These stats only prove that telework is rising in popularity every year and is likely to continue growing. Companies are also embracing this growing desire, increasingly using flexible work options as a way to entice new employees. In a trend that is showing no signs of slowing down, remote work is rapidly on the increase all around the world.

As the Future Workforce survey suggests, the positive results of the experiment is set toaccelerate the trend of remote work even more rapidly. With that change, workers will embracethe benefits of no commutes, fewer meetings, and increased productivity. Additionally, if even afraction of those who are experimenting with remote work embrace it, it could double the shareworking fully remote themselves and have positive implications on U.S. productivity. These findings raise the important question; will the experiment prove sticky for some andaccelerate the adoption of remote work? To shine light on this question, we can look at howsurvey respondents are planning changes in their workforce in the future. The most popular answer for what has worked poorly was technological issues, which is shared by 36.2% of respondents.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. An alignment of business goals to the new cultural standard and employee expectations.

• Employers that want to commit to remote work in the future will need to invest in the infrastructure to remain compliant while not hindering performance.
• The data was collected during June and July of 2020 from 2,025 full time workers at companies with ten or more employees and a range of ages from 21 to 65.
• Therefore people will need to use project management tools to help businesses organize their projects properly.
• So if you haven’t already, it’s time to implement procedures to ensure your employees can work from home successfully, into 2021 and beyond.
• The 4th annual report is the result of data collected by OWL Labs, a collaborative technology company, conducted this year in partnership with Global Workspace Analytics, a leading remote analytics firm.

Obviously, there are still certain advantages to having dedicated office space. Secondly, it brings everyone together in the same place, which appears to simplify personnel management and more. But remote working is easier than it’s ever been before – an internet phone service, for example, can help everyone stay in close contact. Still, Farrer says, there’s a stigma to remote work that many of those in top management can’t seem to shake.

According to Vox, 99% of workers currently working from home would like to continue to do so for the rest of their working lives, if only for part of the time, and 95% say they would recommend remote work to others. The average remote worker saves $4,000 a year on things like lunches out, travel expenses and attire. Even those who work remotely just two days a week can save upward of $2,000 a year.

Many remote working trends we’re seeing today are due to the shifting concept of what a “workplace” is. For employees, it’s all about having a comfortable place to do their best work. The benefits of remote working for employers is all about keeping costs low and minimizing overhead—more workers in the field means less demand for office space. The recent rise of remote working is largely technology-driven, since collaboration via cloud systems is so prevalent. The future of remote work will be dictated by a younger generation of workers intent on working to live instead of living to work. In July article on McKinsey Organization Blog, authors ask three important questions referring to the future of remote work. Seeking for the answers to these questions today can enable employers to switch to a hybrid model of work with guaranteed success tomorrow.

Those boosting remote work are often not entirely straightforward about their intentions — to themselves or their audiences. I’m not referring to meaningful deception, but instead a convenient alignment of incentives and some blind spots oftentimes fueled by class and circumstance.

Aside from the obvious and immediate benefits of remote work, which are that people get to keep their jobs and companies get to stay in business during the pandemic, there are many other benefits for workers and companies alike. The narrative that COVID-19 accelerated existing trends in the workplace, such as adoption of digital tools, has been so pervasive that the statement is starting to become cliché. Although largely true, it is an oversimplification of what is actually happening. Prior to COVID-19, employers were increasingly embracing remote and flexible work arrangements, largely because the pros significantly outweighed the cons. As the pandemic forced lockdowns in countries across the globe, employers were forced to have non-essential workers perform their roles outside of the office or facility.

Make sure you have a finish time in mind each day and try to stick to it. A global remote career peer-to-peer platform designed to support remote & independent lifestyles.

It is also likely to be one where workers are more focused on accomplishing goals to a high level of quality as opposed to filling out a timesheet and working exactly 40 hours a week. In the recent past, you’d have to walk over to your employee’s desks and talk to them, to see whether they are using their time productively. For collaborating on a document at the same time, you’d need to be sitting next to each other at a computer. These days, time-tracking software can be used to monitor productivity, team collaboration and project management software can be used to edit documents, master projects, and much more – from anywhere in the world. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg; we’ll get into details on which are the best tools to use for remote work later on. Harvard business review reported a 13.5% increase in productivity when the employees of Ctrip’s call center were permitted to work remotely. Harvard business review reported anincrease of 13.5% in productivity when the employees of Ctrip’s call center were permitted to work remotely.

Remote Work: Current Agenda

Working four days a week for eight hours in an environment that allows for maximum production can yield the same output as a full week at a traditional desk job. Younger workers are using free time to live their best lives or, for motivated individuals, take on gigs or side projects. This approach to work is part of the “digital nomad” lifestyle trend, with younger workers choosing to embrace a world without anchors. Travel working allows remote employees to hold down a reputable job with a respectable company while traveling to several states or countries over an extended period.

While having teammates work remotely can help companies save money on office space and facilities, there are still costs associated with working remotely, such as home internet, Future of Remote Working coworking memberships and, yes, coffee. Almost the same amount of people reported that all of their team works remotely and that that less than 25% of them work remotely.