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.
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.
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.
Remote and flexible work is on the rise, with 40 percent more U.S. employers reportedly offering flexible workplace options than five years ago, according to Global Workplace Analytics. On top of this organic growth, the Coronavirus pandemic skyrocketed these stats in the second quarter of 2020.
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.
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.
We already talked about how to communicate more effectively and avoid arguments at work. But what should you do when all strategies fail, and you find yourself in the middle of a tense situation at work? Reading the advice we compiled in this article will hopefully help you navigate these muddy waters.
