The Current Trends & Future – Remote Work

The concept of remote work has experienced a seismic shift in recent years thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. The transformation was dramatic. Necessity, as they say, I the mother of invention. Businesses aligned swiftly to the new methods of work and employees adapted to remote work equally quickly. In the process of evolution, what COVID-19 has left behind, is a promising future for remote work. With technological advancements, changing work cultures, and the desire for work-life balance taking centre stage, office settings are re-evolving into modern and more accommodative concepts.?

Some significant advantages of remote work are enumerated in the subsequent paragraphs.?

Functional flexibility enables people to manage their work schedules around personal commitments, ultimately fostering a healthier work-life balance. Those who have the freedom to structure their workdays, see a marked improvement in their job satisfaction and overall well-being. The new-order workplaces have already started to embrace hybrid work profiles and it is a win-win model. Functional flexibility also plays a role in the design of workspaces. There is considerable thought in the re-design aspect. The traditional blending with the modern and contemporary. Shared workspaces, collaborative hubs, and meeting spaces with a fair sprinkling of e-meeting and conferencing platforms are all pointing towards that.

The future of remote work is intrinsically tied to technological innovations and appears promising. Advancements in communication tools, project management platforms, and virtual reality applications are bound to augment remote collaboration. High-speed internet, cloud computing, and cybersecurity measures will become more critical than what they are in ensuring the efficiency and security of remote operations.

Remote work transcends geographic boundaries, allowing companies to access a vast global talent pool. Organizations can recruit and retain the best talent from diverse locations, bringing unique perspectives and expertise to their teams. This multicultural and inclusive approach has the capacity to improve creativity, and innovation, and also improve the quality and effectiveness of work.

All the above said, remote work encourages a results-oriented approach focussing on efficiency and effectiveness delivered together. It ignores fixation on the number of hours spent on the desk. As the future workforce becomes increasingly dispersed, performance evaluation shifts focus on deliverables and outcomes. This shift in mindset is bound to increase autonomy, trust, and accountability among employees.

As all coins have another face as well, remote work is also expected to come with? its own inherent challenges, some of which are discussed below:?

It entails people working remotely to be emotionally robust so that feelings of isolation and social disconnect can be addressed. Employers will have to prioritise employee well-being and implement initiatives to combat loneliness and burnout.? Regular check-ins, virtual team-building activities, and mental health support will be essential components of a successful remote work culture.

Adopting enhanced security measures would be a no-compromise factor in risk mitigation.?

Employees may have the freedom to work from wherever they want, however they want. This?

might include working in public places using public WIFI or working on personal devices.

To mitigate the new risks that surface with a remote workforce, people will need to establish?

clear policies and protocols on BYOD and working in public places.

Depending upon the nature of work, some employees might work significantly better in a quiet office space and may find children, pets, OTT platforms, weather, or other distractions difficult to handle. Organisations may have to develop and deploy policies to identify the best fit for remote work. This may require the additional expenditure in conducting behavioural assessments of a psychological nature.

Looking at the future and the inevitable, it may be worth considering for organisations to understand challenges in the spirit of organisational evolution. This would help them strike a fair balance in the functional ‘human’ aspect as they stare at the inevitability of an idea who’s time has come.

Abhipsa Rani Dash is a Semester III MBA Student of the Batch 2022 - 24.

Article edited by Prof. Cdr Himanshu Joshi .