Before the coronavirus outbreak, 57% of American workers said they rarely or never worked from home. However, the pandemic shifted attitudes toward remote work and accelerated its growth and acceptance in various industries. Here are some things to consider before making it a permanent part of the work environment. When working from home, many of the factors that cause tardiness are reduced or removed. Eliminated factors include oversleeping, being stuck in traffic and waiting in a long line at the drive-through to get morning coffee.
Even if you don’t have every employee working remotely, supporting remote work and formulating a contingency plan in the event of a disaster is good risk management. Traditionally, companies have limited their hiring to people within commuting distance of their office. Unless you’re a large company, you’re competing with companies with more resources to outbid, out-perk, or out-cool you. For businesses outside of metropolitan areas, finding employees can be difficult.
Benefits to working remotely worldwide 2022
However, remote jobs were also posted for managers (19%), senior-level professionals (12%), and entry-level professionals (5%). FlexJobs is excited to announce its 11th annual list of the Top 100 Companies to Watch for Remote Jobs. The 2024 list is based on an analysis of more than 60,000 companies and their remote job postings between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023. There’s a set of real benefits that both employees and employers enjoy. Conversely, hiring virtual staff trims most of these costs down to zero.
But the driving forces behind this new world of work go beyond just the pandemic. They include technological advances, the changing demographic of the workforce, and the rise of the gig economy. But when you work remotely, you can set boundaries and establish rules to minimize distractions, thus maximizing your productivity. Recently, there has been an increasing focus on corporate social responsibility. And rightly so, as businesses have a responsibility to act in a way that is ethical and sustainable. Let’s break this down and consider the most important advantages of remote work from both perspectives, starting with the two just mentioned.
Customized Work Environment
If your symptoms are bad enough to hamper your ability to work, taking a sick day to recover is in everyone’s best interest. Save time and find higher-quality jobs than on other sites, guaranteed. A combination of heightened productivity and performance creates a big snowball effect. Likewise, location independence turns out to yield better workflow performance, which involves fewer quality defects.
They also interact with people at gas stations, coffee shops and restaurants during their commute to work and their lunch. Workers may only exchange pleasantries, but it is in-person social interaction. Video conferencing platforms are an important piece of technology for remote employees to have in their toolbox. These tools act as a virtual office, enabling a scattered workforce to collaborate on projects, share screens and communicate face-to-face. A frequent complaint in today’s world is the difficulty of striking a good work-life balance.
Reduced absenteeism
In the years before the pandemic, about 5% of full-time work was done at home. Within a few days of the outbreak, that number increased to more than 60%. According to experts, that’s about 40 years of growth before the pandemic.
Remote employees can make their workspace as bright or plain as they wish. If you work remotely and have your own office space you can personalize it to reflect your personality. You can put up as many pictures of your kids and animals as you wish, to create an inspiring workspace. This is all about making your work area totally yours, with your favorite plants or your prized baseball cap collection. Whilst this is great from a social point of view it can be difficult to work in this environment. Working remotely, particularly from home, can allow for creative thinking and greater productivity.
Saving Time, Money, and the Environment
When it comes to WFH vs remote working, a recent survey found only 11% will go back to the office full-time. We’ll close by saying you don’t have to make all the decisions about your hybrid virtual model up front and in advance. If you end up finding, say, 30 (or 300) employees clustered around Jakarta, and other groups in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, ask them what might help them feel a socially supported sense of belonging. To the extent that in-person interactions how companies benefit when employees work remotely are important—as we guess they will be—perhaps consider a microhub in one of those cities, if you don’t have one already. Because the hybrid virtual model reduces face-to-face interaction and the serendipitous encounters that occur between people with weak ties, social networks can lose their strength. To counter that risk, leaders should map and monitor the informal networks in their organization with semiannual refreshes of social-network maps.
- Whether there’s a great view from the window or a brick wall – silence is golden.
- The future of work, post-Covid 19, is likely to be even more remote-friendly, with more companies offering flexible working arrangements and employees valuing the freedom of working remotely.
- Companies that offer a flexible working arrangement, such as full, half, or partial remote work, could make the difference for a candidate selecting their next career move.
- Video conferencing platforms are an important piece of technology for remote employees to have in their toolbox.
- Studies from Harvard Business School and Stanford confirm these claims.
- Addressing these boils down to leadership and management styles, and how those styles and approaches support small teams.
Now you can spend rush hour pitying those poor souls stuck in traffic while you make a start on dinner. Without the ties of a physical office, many fully remote employees are taking advantage of the freedom to work from anywhere—whether it be their hometown, the suburbs or the beaches of Bora Bora. This means gathering information, devising solutions, putting new approaches into practice, and refining outcomes—and doing it all fast. If you want to signal that you tolerate virtual work, come into the office every day and join meetings in-person with those who happen to be in the building. This will result in a cultural belief that the HQ or physical offices are the real centers of gravity, and that face time is what’s important.