Coronavirus will Make it Hard to Go Back to the Office after Experiencing the Benefits of Remote Work
The Coronavirus won't lead to remote work at scale
But it will definitely make workers realize how much their quality of life increases. Forcing travel to an office to work on a machine that can be used anywhere is dumb. That’s almost every office job at this point and it's causing workers to waste their life doing things that make no sense at all.
Workers will realize they don’t have to:
- accept a lower quality of life
- waste their life commuting
- work from a fixed location
Having tested remote work, team members will realize:
? Time
Having gained back commuting time and having had the ability to organize work around their lives rather than the other way around, workers will realize how much better their life is working remotely.
They will have the freedom to spend more time doing things they love, either on their own or the people they care about most.
Workers will find it incredibly difficult to go back to a 9-5 once they have lived the benefits of remote work
?? Life-Work Balance
Working in an office limits the opportunity you have to focus on improving your physical and mental health and wellbeing.
Working remotely I find time everyday to workout, eat with family and work on my personal development. This isn't just a nice to have it is a critical part of a higher quality of life.
Workers will find it incredibly difficult to sacrifice their health and well being once they have had the opportunity to improve them while working remotely
?? Flexibility
Having the freedom to work when you are productive will bring massive benefits to workers currently expected to work to someone else's schedule.
Team members who have children or health conditions that require regular medical appointments will find the flexibility to do what they need to do transformational.
Workers will find it incredibly difficult to go back to productivity being measured by time and not output
Remote work benefits are impossible to replicate in the Office
?? Companies won't see office-space as a good use of capital
One company I spoke to recently spends $3,000 per month, per worker to provide office space. Their 2,000 staff cost them $72,000,000 a year in real estate cost to house them.
The reason that is crazy?
They are all knowledge workers.
On average, they commute two hours every day to travel to a place to do work they could do from anywhere in the world. They do little in the form of collaboration but due to their position, an office is an expectation.
In the past, an office was a sign that a company had made it
Now they are a millstone around the neck of companies. An exorbitant cost with no rational explanation as to why companies should continue to pay for it. Soon, office space will lead to significant questions of economic sensibility.
??Companies will see remote as a way to retain and attract great talent
In the current economy, companies live and die by their talent. Remote work will lead to the biggest disruption of the workforce in history. Great talent has more control than ever before to dictate terms of employment to their companies at the point they join a company and that will increasingly lead to them demanding to operate remotely.
The smartest people I know personally ALL plan to work remotely in the next decade
The remote workers I know would NEVER work for a company that wasn't remote again
The best companies I know personally ALL plan to hire remotely in the next decade
The remote companies I know would NEVER employ a worker than wasn't remote again
That's what non-remote companies are up against. The best, most exciting companies only offering remote work. Their costs will be significantly lower. Their average talent level will be significantly higher. That married to the fact almost every talented person on the planet wants more remote working opportunities means this is the perfect storm.
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Retired from GE HealthCare-MR
4 年I like a mixture of working remotely and going into the office. Both have merits.
Senior Android Developer at Move
4 年Having been stuck at home since this all started has quite disillusioned me about working from home. My productivity is incredibly hard to maintain, my separation between work and free time is completely gone (something I worked hard to create and maintain before), my entire daily structure is destroyed (and with it control over other aspects of my life is becoming more difficult) and I miss the social interaction from being in the office (not something I, nor others, would have expected me to say). I have never minded the commute itself (though duration has been an issue before), it gives me time to wake up in the morning and time to wind down in the afternoon/evening. Currently I roll out of bed, make breakfast, sit down and start working. I don't stop until its time for dinner. As far as I'm concerned the only thing that would be nice is if it was a little easier to plan in a day of working from home once in a blue moon when I have a doctors or dentist appointment. No more then a day at a time though.
Technology Director of Business Relationship Management (BRM)
4 年1000% agree on this!
Instructional Designer at ProbeCX Philippines Inc. formerly Stellar Philippines Inc.
4 年Look on the brighter side, you didnt have to go through a daily two or more hours of bearing the traffic, those lost unproductive hours lost to traffic everyday costed a lot of unproductive days. You just converted those lost traffic hours into more productive output because you now WFH. The stress of WFH was worth it compared to the earlier nonproductive traffic stress :-)