What Does the Future Hold for Remote Work?
Not since WWII have world economies seen such a rapid and drastic shift in the way we work. As governments around the globe responded to COVID-19 infection rates, large groups of employees gave up their commute and began working from home. Pre-COVID, around a third of Australian companies supported remote work or flexible work from home arrangements. Today, after successive lockdowns caused us all to take a different view of work, that figure has more than doubled. Gartner HR’s survey shows 88% of organisations have encouraged or required employees to work from home.
COVID effectively prompted one of the largest work from home experiments than ever before. Business’ reticence to allow or enable employees to work remotely turned to willing necessity and then satisfaction at the results. So what does this mean for the future of our workplaces and arrangements?
CAPTION: Are tiny, sterile cubicles the workplace of the future? (Photo by Smartworks Coworking on Unsplash)
The changing view of remote work
Upwork’s pre and post-pandemic surveys of hiring managers, executives, VPs and supervisors indicate that the anomaly of remote work is likely to become the norm.
Pre-COVID just 2.3% of hiring managers had fully remote teams and approximately 13.2% of the workforce were fully remote. As expected, those figures have flipped – dramatically. Over half the workforce now work remotely and around 94% of hiring managers work with remote talent to some degree.
To say the remote/work from home experiment has gone well, is somewhat of an understatement. 56% of hiring managers report the shift to remote work has gone better than expected. As a result of this, many – 61.9% in fact – intend to include larger remote working teams in their future business models.
While remote work has many advantages – no commute times, higher levels of productivity and fewer distractions and pointless meetings with colleagues – there have been some downsides. Technology issues, juggling home responsibilities with work and a creeping sense of loneliness are some of the obstacles people have faced. While technology issues are relatively simply to iron out, the human connection we enjoy from gathering in a common workplace is less easy to emulate through Slack messages or Zoom meetings. So what will this mean for post-COVID workplaces? Is the office dead or will some new iteration of the workplace rise up?
A new view of work
Businesses and hiring managers are clearly taken with the idea of remote work. For them, it’s not just the increased levels of productivity and commitment from their teams. Lower overheads, access to a global talent pool, reduced absenteeism and office politics are also driving factors for companies.
We believe that it’s likely many businesses will find a happy balance between centralized offices that everyone attends Monday to Friday between the hours of 9 – 5 and fully remote workforces. This balance is most likely to occur in the form of ‘hybrid’ workplaces.
A hybrid workplace takes the advantages of a centralized office and remote workforce while minimizing the downsides. Often located outside the CBD of a city or town, rents are substantially lower. In some cases, businesses can make use of enterprise solutions such as flexible office spaces or simply rent smaller locations. When the workforce is managed with remote working options, less people are at work at any given time meaning the a smaller space can accommodate everyone. What’s more, a landlord managed office space removes the requirement for a business’ own facilities manager or even cleaners – this is provided as part of the service for all tenants using the for-hire office space.
Smaller satellite offices also speak to the requirement for colleagues to get together for face to face collaboration and simple human connection. They also reduce the time spent on a commute for days when remote workers do attend a central or satellite location. On focus days, employees are able to get more done from their work from home office. This hybrid arrangement makes both office meetings and home working more enjoyable and thus more productive for the business.
COVID-19 has instigated many changes across our societies. Arguably, the biggest change will be to the way we view work, where we work, and what it means to be productive for a business. Hours spent sitting at a desk are no longer the benchmark of employee productivity. A change of view toward output, effective collaboration and simply getting the job done is at last becoming the common measure for achievement.