Could COVID-19 be the catalyst to permanently working from home?
COVID-19 may fundamentally change workplace patterns, as businesses are compelled to facilitate flexible working conditions. It is likely that most companies will find their employees may not want to return to the office once the quarantine restrictions have been removed.
Tech companies were among the first to make the transition to remote work, drawing on proven services such as workplace chat groups, online access to business resources, and the fact that a majority of work can be completed remotely.
In Seattle, the center of several of America’s early COVID-19 cases, corporations like Amazon, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google advised employees to avoid going to the workplace at the end of February. At the beginning of March, Twitter “strongly advised” all its employees across the globe to do the same and made it compulsory on Wednesday.
The unexpected growth in working from home raises both challenges and possibilities: on one side, start-ups such as Slack and Zoom and existing companies like Google and Microsoft are providing their tools free of charge, in the belief that people who start using them in a crisis can continue to do work until normality returns.
As the situation develops, managers of businesses who have sent workers to operate from home are now beginning to ask if they ever needed to go to the office in the first place.
“We understand this is an unprecedented step, but these are unprecedented times,” Twitter’s head of HR, Jennifer Christie, said in a message to staff. Christie promised to compensate staff, even seasonal workers, for the expenses of setting up home offices, and will offset the expense of buying items such as computing equipment, tables and ergonomic chairs. “Overall, working from home doesn’t change your day-to-day work, it just means you’re having to do something in a different environment,” Christie explained.
This kind of expenditure has led others to question if businesses who accept remote work in a crisis may find it sticking around when normality returns.
“This is not how I envisioned the distributed work revolution taking hold,” said Matt Mullenweg, Chief Executive of WordPress and Automattic. Mullenweg’s business is now “distributed” and expects that the changes “will also offer an incentive for other businesses to eventually create a culture that requires long-standing job versatility.
“Millions of people will get the chance to experience days without long commutes, or the harsh inflexibility of not being able to stay close to home when a family member is sick… This might be a chance for a great reset in terms of how we work,” he said. For the next six months, Microsoft has made its cloud “productivity suite” software free for small companies, like its Slack competitor, Teams. Google followed up with its own business subscription, whereas the Zoom video conferencing company removed its own free-tier restrictions, enabling conversations to reach 40 minutes.
In conclusion, COVID-19 is driving businesses into a trial run. For everyone’s sake, let’s hope the trial is successful.
If your working from home trial isn’t going to plan, contact the team at ServiceScaler for assistance in delivering effective remote worker solutions.