When the first wave of COVID-19 forced the world into lockdown, business leaders scrambled to pivot out of necessity. Overnight, they had to make financial adjustments and staffing decisions to keep the business afloat. They had to reassure stakeholders, hone their public message, and implement health and safety measures. If being a great leader was difficult before, now it has become even tougher.
If there’s one lesson the pandemic taught business owners this year, it’s that having a virtual workforce is doable across many industries and sectors. About 50 percent of surveyed companies in the United States and Canada think their employees are more productive when working from home and project this will continue in 2021, according to Talent Trends.
However, the research also indicates that another 43 percent of companies are not sure if they can adapt to a digitally enabled remote work entirely in the months ahead.
This year threw the workforce for a major loop, as millions of people exchanged office cubicles for their own sofas and kitchen tables. And while this shift in daily scenery is one thing for existing employees, for new team members there’s a different story altogether. In a matter of months, remote onboarding has become an even hotter topic.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working has become more and more widespread. According to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work survey, at the beginning of this year, 62 percent of full-time employees in US worked remotely to some degree. By now, more than 65 percent are mostly working from home. And the already fragile work-life balance is once again under great pressure. Therefore, avoiding burnout and caring for the mental health of their employees have become paramount for companies from all over the world.
Six months into the new Coronavirus pandemic and we still have no clue when this crisis is going to end. Medical experts like Dr. Lisa Maragakis, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins, think that the pandemic’s first wave is gone. Most likely, we are now at the beginning of the second wave. So what does that mean for how people work together and businesses operate?
For the past half of the year, the economy has been revolving around virtual teams more than ever before. With lockdown measures in place, the only way for companies and workers all over the world to keep their jobs and their business going was switching to virtual spaces. Adjusting to this new way of working hasn’t been easy for anyone. And it has been particularly challenging for those who were doing it for the first time.
This article is coming to give a helping hand to those team leaders, managers, and workers who are trying to make their virtual teams work and prosper during these strange times.
At the beginning of 2020, an estimated 62 percent of full-time employees in the United States worked remotely at least to some degree, according to Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work survey. That number steeply increased in the wake of COVID-19. This escalation in working offsite requires the use of virtual communication tools to keep teams on the same page, despite shifts in workflow and location.
We’ve been talking a lot about working from home during this climate of uncertainty and the challenges it brings. And we’ve analyzed the efforts we’re all putting in order to overcome these issues while building a new normality. To accomplish this, we need to find new ways to keep our work productivity up, even after the rules of the game have been unexpectedly changed overnight due to the Coronavirus pandemic.
There’s no doubt that COVID-19 has changed every aspect of our lives over a very short period of time. We had to adapt to all kinds of new situations without prior notice, and that came with many challenges. Take work from home for example. Besides the ones related to infrastructure, equipment, and managing work-life balance, there is also an additional barrier. The communication skills of your team members are now at the make it or break it point.
Months into the outbreak of COVID-19 and it has become evident that this pandemic will change how jobs are structured in the long-term. In fact, an estimated 25 to 30 percent of American employees could work from home a couple of days per week by the end of 2021, according to a Global Workplace Analytics prediction, with or without further lockdown.
