Is remote working blessing or burden for companies?
Almost every aspect of our daily lives has been influenced by COVID-19, including overall productivity. The greatest shift has been the idea of working from home. About half of the country’s population is doing it today. The planet has never seen an exercise of this scale.
Will work from home in its present configuration be transient or continue here? Can organisations see that as a feasible choice, especially with people arguing that the barriers between work and life have almost disappeared?
We see shifts in levels of operation, changes in daily routines, how workers remain on top of things outside of the use of work and productivity tools. Many major tech companies have announced plans to allow their workers to continue working for much of 2020 from home. Others are making the move more permanent. Actions are taken by some Companies:
Twitter announced that jobs would be enabled “forever” to operate remotely.
Facebook Inc has said that it will permit its workers to work from home until July next year while Google has prolonged the remote working time for employees who do not need to be in the workplace until June next year.
Negative Findings On Working Remote
In global research conducted by SAP, Qualtrics and Mind Share Collaborators, researchers surveyed more than 2,000 workers in Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States in March and April of this year. They found that the pandemic had an effect on mental health around the world. About 40% of people indicated that their mental health has deteriorated since the epidemic of COVID-19. (rephrase)
According to a survey of more than 1,000 remote workers by Twingate, remote work leads workers to lose a sense of work/life balance during the pandemic. Their results include the following:
Zoom is the No. 1 video conferencing device used by remote staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.
40 per cent of staff experienced emotional fatigue from video calls while working remotely.
59% of workers feel more cyber-safe working in-office than at home.
22 per cent of home-based jobs bought a VPN after the pandemic.
58 per cent of staff reported chatting about classified details on job video calls.
Over 1 in 10 workers got their video calls compromised.
More than half (59%) of employees felt more secure digitally when working from the company office, and more than 1 in 3 (36%) were more cautious about opening up emails at home.
However, remote job systems have one big downside: they frequently prevent companies from developing and solidifying their corporate culture. Business culture is fostered, to a large degree, by workers working together and participating in team bonding events and division-or corporate-wide meetings—so that disjointed departments will make this impossible to achieve.
But how relevant is the culture of the company? Will it be prioritised in favour of the ease that telecommunications offer?
Work from home-based policies may have an effect on the growth of business culture in a number of ways. Cultural consequences that unregulated telecommunications could have include:
1. Colleagues and teams being siloed from each other
As workers work primarily or entirely from home, they are likely to only communicate with their peers via e-mail and occasional calls. This is critical for two reasons—first, engaging with colleagues on a regular basis encourages expectations-setting. When new workers are constantly introduced to the actions of their peers, they are able to appreciate success and communication expectations even more easily than they may have been remote. Second, social activity is positively associated with job participation and happiness.
A survey conducted by Gallup of more than 15 million workers revealed that the people with the best “work buddies” are “seven times more likely to work, to be better able to engage clients, to achieve better quality jobs than those without them”
2.Feeling of isolation
Although working from home at first can make life easier, it can negatively impact the mental health of employees. Humans are social beings, and people will feel cut off from seeing anyone.
Remote workers are more likely to fight corporate politics, fear bosses say negative things behind their backs, and campaign against them. A Study of 1,100 Employees Found that Remote Workers Feel lack of work buddies and left out.
3.Enthusiasm for developing and growing a company is more difficult to cultivate.
You want workers to be excited about the job they do—inspiring enthusiasm through a scattered team is not difficult, but definitely not easy. When your workers are 100% inspired, it’s hard to generate passion for your service or product without enough social commitment—high spirits are hard to convey digitally.
Positive Findings On Working Remote
For employees:
Companies or employers who encourage their workers to personalise their way of completing work tend to have job satisfaction and lower operational costs. Let us talk more about the advantages that employers will enjoy from empowering workers to work remotely.
A Glassdoor survey found that 70% of respondents thought that their company had reacted to workers’ health and safety issues. Another 60 per cent said they can function successfully no matter how long they have to do WFH, and 50 per cent said they’re operating as or more efficient remotely. A study by Citrix found that 45% of workers believed employers were “fairly ready” for the transition to working remote, and 38% said the transition was “fairly easy”; however, two positive areas emerged in regard to how companies handled the pandemic shift to remote working:
91 per cent of workers felt the support of their managers during the transition.
92% of respondents felt that their companies took all the measures.
Fewer DISTRACTIONS
Sometimes an office environment can also be loud and distracting for some employees. For example, if one employee has a phone call, other employees can also be distracted around the desk. But remote workers are free of such problems. They can focus on their work for a longer time.
Better work-life balance
There is indeed a lot to talk about the quality of life at work, but few companies are effectively offering their employees an attractive workplace culture.No matter how much emotional decompression rooms, games rooms, and other perks are available, it’s a fact that people always miss their “me-time” dedicated to their needs. So, remote workers can start and end their day based on their needs.
Less Stress
Few are fortunate workers who have the ability to take a stroll to the workplace. It’s because of the distance of their jobs to the house. An employee who spends more than two hours a day trapped in a traffic jam, wastes work time and has a terrible quality of life, is expected to experience more health issues and frustration.
Cost reduction
If an organisation prefers to work with remote teams, monetary tools are used in the most possible manner. With fewer employees at work, the business no longer has to afford vast rooms full of offices, computers and telephones. In addition, you can also save on power, water, oil, property taxes and other fixed costs that are burdened by cash that does not directly benefit the corporation.
FOR COMPANIES:
It is quick to figure out why remote working has become a trend in the workplace. The workers today enjoy the versatility of telecom transmission, which is more efficient and less exhausting at home.
Overhead avoidance is the clearest cost-benefit derived from telecommuting. Companies who do not have to pay for the office and supplies of workers will save a little in one year. In one report, an employee could save INR 8,11,784 on an average and save between INR 147597and INR 516589 in a company’s allowance to work just half the time at home.
Health care prices are lower: One research showed homeworkers showing 25% lower levels of stress, making better food choices and enhancing working-life balance. These aspects help workers lead healthy lives, both of which will reduce their health expenditure gradually.
Lower costs of travel: businesses that run will save on lengthy business trips. They will also use them as a tool that reduces employee travel and commuting expenses since they are already using video chat and online contact channels in everyday activities.
Improved client service: As clientele services improve because now people have more time to invest in work.
Employees Want Remote Work, Too
73 per cent note that they are very successful when working from home, according to a Global Workplace Analytics survey of employees working remotely during the pandemic, and 86 per cent say they feel ‘fully productive’ working from their home office. And of the 3,000 respondents, on average, 76 per cent want to continue working at least 2.5 days per week from home.
It is obvious that people value being able to work from home. And as more and more firms switch to a remote-first or entirely remote model, job seekers are even more likely to find (and land) the ideal job-from-home position.
Blessing or Burden: A final word
The effect of Covid-19 on all aspects of life, in all nations and in all sectors, is seen by the world. The reality is that many activities and roles can be accomplished online, and much better with the help of technology and other interactive tools.
In terms of merits and demerits of remote work, Vanessa Tierney, CEO and co-founder of Abodoo, a data-driven matching network, concludes: While the challenge of remote work has now been revealed, the merits outweigh the demerits and push tech conglomerates like Facebook and Twitter to enable their employees to work “forever” from home.
The IT industry moved to the WFH model during the lockdown very easily, delivering market stability to consumers without reducing efficiency or productivity, pleasing industry leaders and customers alike.
It has proven that with the right processes in place, businesses will prosper and succeed from anywhere in the world. Two reasons for this seamless transition are the rigid commitment of the IT industry to quality systems and the provision of bandwidth connectivity both from homes in metros and in small towns.
Many industrial executives, who led their corporations during the 2008 Great Recession. One of these pioneers is Roger Neel, co-founder and CTO of Mavenlink, who summarises the unparalleled difficulties posed by most organisations as a result of the pandemic crisis: “Better or worse, this time of instability and significant transformation is expected to have a lasting effect on the way various businesses communicate and the way organisations work.
What next???
After post-Covid-19, you can need to re-engine the company to minimise costs, among other items. Future work would be achieved by a mix of in-house services, home work, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and local towns. The trick is to get the most optimal model based on many criteria, such as type of function, protection requirements, consumer constraints, etc.
For scattered teams, problems like loss of coordination, security issues, preparation and on-board difficulties and burnout are more pronounced. If remote work becomes more of a modern standard, we can see these issues climb to the priority ladder for organisations that are seeking to evolve and move ahead with this new model. The way businesses handle these problems today will be very revealing about their future tomorrow.