As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, millions of people have transitioned to telecommuting. For some, working from home feels like newfound freedom. There’s no boss hovering over your head, no soul-crushing commute to work, and everything feels so much more flexible and enjoyable. However, after you spend a couple of weeks working remotely, you start to notice its challenges. What once seemed interesting and exciting is now monotonous, dull, and makes you feel the beginning of a burnout.
More than a decade ago, open floor plans were heralded as the future of workplace design. The drab walls and cubicles that conjured images from the movie Office Space were no longer the norm. By then, companies could look and feel like hip, young startups with open space plans and team members sitting right next to each other.
The Coronavirus pandemic has in a very short period of time profoundly impacted our lives, changing the very way we live, work, and socialize. These days, many employees are trying to adjust to working from home – sometimes without a proper workspace available – and being productive in the midst of it all can be a real challenge. However, of all the challenges that come with this transition, setting up an accommodating home office is one of the easiest to fix.
Only using this term — digital transformation — in this day and age, gives me shivers. By now, most businesses around the world should have already gone digital. But you know what they say, what you fear most usually happens. And this is how a pandemic has succeeded to change the unchanged.
COVID-19 turned our lives upside down and lockdown forced millions of people to suddenly give up their office routine and relocate their desk to the kitchen table. As we discussed in a previous article on this topic, these changes came with several challenges. But it’s not only individuals who are affected by all these. Companies lose billions while being forced to rethink employment, advertising, and even their business models.
Suddenly a good portion of the workforce finds itself working remote. If you’re an HR professional or manager who had new hires lined up pre-pandemic, you might be wondering how to onboard remotely. When you’re already dealing with an experimental distributed workplace, bringing on a new team member might seem at best, daunting, and, at worst, a nightmare.
Transparency may seem like a corporate buzzword, but it actually has real-world benefits. According to a recent poll, two thirds of consumers would spend more if it meant buying from a transparent company, and 94 percent of consumers rank transparency as the biggest factor in brand loyalty.
Can you imagine rolling out of bed, turning on your desktop and being at work? This is a reality for many workers, now more than ever before. Thirty-second commute aside, there are certainly challenges when it comes to working remotely. How can you reach an effective collaboration with colleagues that are thousands of miles away? How can managers allocate workload for a team that’s spread across the world?
Remote work delivered by a virtual team has been an increasingly popular workplace trend over the past decade. However, given the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire global workforce is participating in a mass work from home experiment. A recent MIT survey found that more than 34 percent of workers switched to telecommuting in April due to stay-at-home orders.
In 2019, remote employment secured its position as more than just a trend but as a mainstay in American business. With 62 percent professionals working on a remote basis either full-time or at some frequency, according to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work Survey, remote work was quickly becoming the norm.
In 2020, this flexible option has abruptly become mandatory. In the economics of the Coronavirus pandemic, organizations were forced to switch in order to survive. And for this purpose, they need to keep their remote teams virtually connected, no matter how spread out they are. Not only to drive connection between employees, but also to ensure productivity.
