Work From Home — The New Normal
COVID-19 has triggered one of the largest experiments in corporate history. For most companies, the experiment seems to work well as their daily business chores are going on as usual. But what is yet to be seen is whether the companies are ready to accept work from home as a new normal. The COVID-19 situation has also synthesized two factions of experts — one who believes that COVID-19 is going to be a part and parcel of everyone’s lives and another who believes that this trend will fizz out along with COVID-19.
But some of the largest tech giants in the globe have already taken significant measures towards adopting this new working model to suit the new world. We have divided the types of companies based on their level of adoption of the work-from-home model. Here are they -
The Conservative Planners
This encompasses those organizations that have conservatively planned their work-from-home policy for their employees without taking any drastic or long-term measures. These organizations include popular tech-giants like Google and Facebook who are incrementally extending their work from home adoption. For instance, Google had first announced that its employees will work remotely until June 1 st. But with the situation not getting better anytime soon, it has extended its work-from-home policy till the end of 2020. Similarly, Facebook has stated that its employees can work from home till the end of the year and Amazon has stated that its employees need not come to their headquarters in Seattle till October.
These organizations are taking it one step at a time and do not want to completely do away with the work-from-office model in the coming years. But as time progresses and looking at how things are proceeding, there is a possibility that these companies might adopt the work-from-home policy for more years to come.
The Model Shifters
These include the organizations that have made a monumental shift to the work-from-home model from their existing system which is often considered to be rigid to a certain extent. The prime example of this type is Tata Consultancy that devised a new model called 25–25. According to this mode, TCS will ask 75% of 4.48 lakhs workforce globally to work from home. The current industry average is 20%. The new model will require much less office space and TCS believes that by 2025 only 25% of our workforce needs to be at the office premises. Another organization that has made a drastic shift in their working model is Twitter. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter has asked his employees to work from home indefinitely even after the offices have reopened. Something that would have been unheard in a massive organization like Twitter.
These organizations have realized the importance of work from home and considered the COVID-19 situation as just a catalyst to start this trend. They have realized fully that work from home is going to be the new normal until some other trend emerges.
The Status Quo Benefiters
Organizations like Zapier and Gitlab have always embraced the work-from-home model from the start. These organizations have 100% remote workers that have helped them to possess a diverse workforce located across the globe. These are also the organizations that had minimal impact on their business due to the COVID-19 situation. They always boast a low attrition rate as they offer flexible working hours to the employees, focus on asynchronous but formal communication over synchronous informal communications, all of which lead to improved productivity of the employees and better performance of the organization.
One thing that connects all these companies irrespective of which bucket they fall into is that they all realize that work from home will never affect their day to day business. In fact, some of the organizations have started reaping the benefits of switching to the work from home model. The next section talks about how employers are getting benefited by shifting to the work from home model.
What it means to the employers
Here are some of the ways how the employers are positively affected by the shift to the work-from-home model -
Cost Savings
When the employees start working out of home, they save a significant part of the expenses. In fact, a study points out that every remote worker can save the employer roughly around $10,000 per year.
Earlier, organizations used to spend a considerable amount as the relocation charges for the employees, especially if they are located in other places. With remote working, they can save on this cost and at the same time, hire the talent of their liking.
Access Diverse Candidates
Location is no more a constraint for employers as they can tap into talent in any corner of the world. As the competition is on the rise in all industries, organizations are finding it extremely difficult to hire the right candidates. The qualified candidates are unwilling to relocate. With work from home coming into the picture, organizations no longer have to be location-dependent and they can even hire people with skills that were unavailable locally.
Retaining Talent
Popular reasons that most employees state while leaving the organization is their necessity to relocate to another city due to personal reasons or their inability to commute for long distances between their home and office. These reasons are invalidated completely by allowing employees to work from home as the location is no longer a problem for them. This reduces the attrition significantly and helps the organization to retain the talent for a longer period of time. On top of it, they can fully utilize the considerable sum of money spent on training and hiring these employees. It is believed that an employer loses approximately six to nine months of the salary of the departing staff. The hiring costs are also considerably reduced especially on activities such as advertising a vacancy, man-hours spent on the interview process, training expenses, etc.
Improved Productivity
Working from home means lower absenteeism, better engagement, and flexible work timings all of which lead to improved productivity. Home-based workers have a lower stress level due to lack of commute and using that time to do something they love leading to a better quality of life. They also focus more on work at home as there are no unnecessary breaks, chatters from colleagues, etc.
Now that we have seen how it impacts the employers, let us switch our focus to the next stakeholder in the corporate ecosystem — Employees.
What does it mean to the employees?
Working from home not only helps the employees by improving their productivity, but it also has loads of other benefits. Here are some of them -
Rise in independence
When you are working from home, your dependence on others reduces drastically which was quite normal in the office. You reach out to your colleagues due to their easy availability for even the simplest of doubts which means you never got a chance to grow and learn from your mistakes. With work from home, your independence increases as you start making the decisions on your own because your colleagues are no longer available near your desk.
Improvement in communication skills
While working from home you automatically improve upon your communication skills as you have to constantly find different modes of communication to interact with your colleagues. One mode of communication can work for one set of the audience while another will work for the rest. You will learn what works for whom by remote working and will become an expert in communication.
Better Work-Life Balance
This is arguably the most important impact of work from home model. Work from Home elevates your work-life balance as you can save time on the commute and use that for more productive activities leading to a better work-life balance.
One of the most important changes that you will notice as an organization is in your L&D and training activities.
The impact on Training Activities
In a survey, it was estimated that 40% of the organizations that had embraced face to face training before the advent of COVID-19 are under huge pressure concerning their training processes. Nearly 51% of the organizations are still trying to complete the migration from face to face to other formats such as online training.
Even the organizations that had carved a niche for themselves in their training processes have seen COVID-19 negatively impacting their training budget and are finding the shift towards online training an arduous task. This can be attributed to reasons such as high dependency on classroom training, under-prepared trainers who do not have experience with remote training, lack of proper infrastructure such as internet bandwidth, etc.
On the other hand, the learners are struggling too with their inability to manage work, life, and training from the home and their unfamiliarity in learning through digital platforms.
The need of the hour is for organizations to invest wisely on an LMS platform like KloudLearn that is not only user-friendly but meets the requirements of any organization with their long-list of features. Since it is unclear when the situation will improve, every organization should move to an LMS enabled training as early as possible.
Taking the LMS route also allows your employees to manage their work-life balance as it offers self-paced learning. You can even offer performance support to them by creating digital assets that will be helpful in their day-to-day activities.
The impact on business
With employees no longer coming to offices, there is a sudden boost in the spending patterns in some categories, while a reduction in the rest. Organizations are modifying their pay structure to the employees. For instance, organizations are considering doing away with components like travel allowance, petrol allowance and instead incorporate components like internet allowance, home furniture allowance, etc. that will allow the employees to work better at home. Organizations are also spending more on remote training tools like LMS, video conferencing tools, etc. instead of spending on office on building training rooms or invest in in-class training equipment.
Wrapping Up
The work-from-home model has seen a massive adoption since the outbreak of the pandemic. Most organizations have partially or completely asked their employees to work from home. These organizations are also reaping the benefits of this shift. However, many organizations are being forced by the governments to reopen their office and welcome the staff back to make the economy bounce back to the golden times.
