Flexible work is no longer just a trend. And remote working — mostly from home during this pandemic — comes with a unique set of challenges. While none outweigh the overall benefits of distributed teams, leaders do need to shift their management and processes to get the best results from a remote workforce.
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.
The core concept of working from home has changed overnight. Instead of making a choice when the context was right, millions of people are now forced to work from home during a crisis that affects and even threatens their lives and the lives of those they hold dear. Our way of living turned upside down and we are forced to readjust without prior notice. As a result, even if previous studies have shown incredible benefits in favor of remote working, most of those do not apply in the current situation.
Gone are the days when companies had everybody working physically side-by-side and remote teams were scarce. The future of work is upon us, by choice or by context. And now more than ever, it has become vital for any business to streamline its communication flow and enable access to the company’s life to all their employees, regardless of where these are located.
The digital workplace is rapidly evolving. With new tools, greater demand from users, and a focus on productivity and efficiency, technology is changing the way we work for the better. As we look ahead to the trends that are shaping the modern workplace, we notice that flexible work and the availability of the right digital tools will continue to become more and more important.
As companies become more competitive in attracting the best workforce and achieving the highest productivity with the lowest costs, workplace trends continue to change. During the previous years, we’ve seen paid vacations, nap rooms, game rooms, free buffet, remote offices, and other interesting ideas. But in 2019, people expect more.
Companies all around the world go above and beyond to build strong teams capable of performing difficult tasks with the minimum amount of resources, in the shortest possible time. That is the very definition of productivity. All leaders and managers know that having people work together means enhanced problem-solving capabilities and greater potential for innovation. And this is how team building activities were born.
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance can be difficult in today’s culture that celebrates being always on. In fact, 94 percent of 1,000 professionals surveyed by the Harvard Business Review said they put in 50 or more hours a week at work. What’s more, nearly half that group clocked in more than 65 hours a week.
