The Benefits of Working From Home Working Remotely

In Gallup’s September 2021 study, 54% of workers said they believed that their company’s culture would be unchanged by remote work, while 12% believed it would improve and 33% predicted it would deteriorate. However, many companies continue to resist this work trend for various reasons. Some business owners may fear a lack of productivity in their employees, while others haven’t invested in teleconferencing and telework tech to support remote workers.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the office was considered pivotal to the productivity of knowledge workers, organizational cohesion and a key asset used to attract and retain talent (Boland et al., 2020). Regardless of the tone of the argument, COVID-19 has called into question the fundamental purpose and physical form of the office. Our findings showed that quarter to one-third of the knowledge workers found the social aspects of WFH such as sense of cohesion and knowledge sharing challenging. In addition, half of the respondents stated social isolation as one of the key challenges while WFH during COVID-19 pandemic.

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Get some textured surfaces going and a pop or two of your favorite color. Getting your Wi-Fi nicely dialed in and performing at its best can be a bit of a journey, but it’s worth the effort to have a stable, reliable internet connection. At first glance, it may seem as though the design and outfitting of your dedicated workspace is more about creature comfort, but your work environment does affect both the quality and quantity of your work.

• A plan for ease of restrictions and returning to the workplace was released in May along with strict social distancing rules.
• Those who worked full time (8 hours/day) at home are 70% less productive than those who don’t work from home.
• The companies that can execute this workplace model effectively are the ones that will attract and retain the best talent.
• What workers will soon realize is that the autonomy remote work offers is far more valuable in normal times, when it is easy to go on a run during lunch, do school drop-off and pickup during breaks or take a mid-day yoga class to balance your day.
• With 42% of Americans working from home and 26% working at their employer’s physical location.
• That’s when frustration sets in, and you decide working from home doesn’t work for you.
• In some cases, WFH can simply mean you’re not working from your dedicated office.
• Certainly, you’ll take part in video conferences and conference calls while working remotely.

Our team is passionate about working from home ourselves and helping other small businesses, startups, and larger organizations work better from a home office. It’s important for employers to grant employees who are new to having a remote job a little extra slack as they learn the ropes. As you embark together on this WFH journey, please remember to show some extra patience for technical difficulties, family members in the background, and a little general disarray at first. When you’re not in an office with your fellow employees, you might miss out on training and skills development courses that are taught in person. Your company might even forget to add you to its online training courses. It can be tempting to regard this as a dodged bullet, but you might be missing out on an opportunity to learn something useful.

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For computer-based work and other sedentary work, it’s important to stand up and move to get your blood circulating every so often, at least once an hour. It also helps to move your eyes off of the screen regularly, even if it’s a micro-break of 10 to 20 seconds. You can be more productive when you focus intently for smaller periods of time. Spend a couple of hours timing how long you can work before getting distracted.

• Some evidence indicates that knowledge exchange, mentorship and impromptu communications might suffer in a virtual-only environment, but more research is needed.
• Increased working hours include compromised health, well-being, and sleep as a consequence of disruption of the daily life routine, anxiety, worry, isolation, greater family and work stress, and excessive screen time[119].
• Choose your favorite music and set the volume to “nightclub” if that helps motivate you.
• Most employees reported the same or higher level of productivity after transitioning to WFH arrangements as also suggested by findings from a study by Colley and Williamson (2020).

Regular post-occupancy evaluation surveys focus groups and deploying measurement instruments to collect real-time data and feedback will be necessary for gradual learning in this process. The future workspace (or a network of workspaces) will need to be enhanced in strategic ways, incorporating technologies, protocols and hybrid ways of working. Can this pandemic be a trigger to a revolution in large-scale adoption of remote working? No one knows for sure at this stage, but it seems like a probable future.

You can ditch the time-consuming commute.

Furniture ergonomics (40%) and stress and burn-out (39%) are also amongst the top challenges mentioned by the respondents (Figure 6). Organizations seemed to be more concerned about productivity, culture, health and safety (Figure 2), showing differing viewpoints between employees and organizations. The adjustment rate amongst the employees was quick with 97% of the knowledge workers stating it took up 2 weeks to adjust to the new WFH arrangements including 66% who indicated that they adjusted to WFH within 2 days (Figure 3). The employees reported flexible working policies (72%), IT-software (70%) and IT-hardware (61%) as the top three factors supporting transition (Figure 1). The respondents also indicated that for the current WFH arrangement “technology” was the most valuable enabler of productive work.

• There are significant advantages to working from home for many, but there are disadvantages and challenges too.
• Keep in mind that you may not know what another person is going through not only in life, but also in their home work environment.
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of workers began remote work for the first time.[17] Cities in which the population of remote workers increased significantly were referred to as Zoom towns.[18] According to a U.S.
• For instance, those individuals high in “growth need strength” will have a more positive reaction to increased autonomy and a more negative reaction to decreased feedback in remote work than those individuals low in “growth need strength”.
• The flexibility offered by remote work could go a long way toward fostering more engaged and balanced employees.
• For that reason, it’s handy to have a mix of strong technical skills and creative problem-solving ability.

Many industry experts reported on the increasing importance of connections and networks to business success moving forward into increasing digital realms (Eltringham, 2020a, 2020b). The physical workplace plays a pivotal role in communicating brand identity (Edwards, 2020) and through principles of person-environment work from home experience fit (Carnevale and Hatak, 2020), maintaining company culture and productivity. The value proposition of the future workplace is shifting and requires consideration beyond the cost benefits of space density (Edwards, 2020) but a clarity of purpose in a hybridized face-to-face virtual workforce.