Hybrid Working Model
If someone told you that 67% of Australian employees will be working from home in 2022 back in 2019, you would have immediately brushed off this suggestion. But then, this is what the pandemic has done.
As per Australian Institute of Family Studies, 67% of surveyed employees, were either sometimes or always working from home, compared to 42% pre covid. That’s a phenomenal 25% jump in employees making their homes their workplace.
This jump was not out of choice, rather an act of compliance for everyone’s safety. It’s been 2 years now since the pandemic started and the vaccination rates have reached levels where most developed countries feel comfortable to consider “Living with Covid” as BAU. With this does Work at Home become a BAU as well? Or do the employers go back to the earlier norms of a typical 9-5 and working from office environment? Are the employees ready to go back to the office? Have they gotten enough of working from home? Is there a balance between working from office vs working from home?
These are the questions that pop up in my head very frequently. I recently read an interesting post by one of my friends @Digvijay Ankoti, who is VP at Concentrix Philippines where he presented some amazing insights about working at home in a country like Philippines. He made interesting data observations evaluating added fuel costs worth $750M to bring the employees back to office. He further estimated $2Billion worth of potential revenue lost annually to traffic or the time spent in getting people to work and back home.
Now… We all know and some of the observations made by Diggi ?re-affirm how difficult it will be to bring the workforce back to the office environment. There are various other elements and savings that the organizations have realized since sending most of the workforce home. The savings and benefits of having a Work at Home workforce are predominantly industry and organization specific; hence, I will steer away from presenting too much data on this. In the context of an office based job, the savings on real estate, infrastructure and support services to enable office based work are enormous and run into millions of $$ depending on the size of the organization.
I’d like to instead delve into an employee’s perspective. How do they see this model working? Are they keen to come back to the office? Do they believe W@H is the future?
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In my next article, I will share my thoughts on W@H based on my experience in the last 2 years after spending 18 years working from office and how that has affected me personally as well as trends that I have seen in my workforce since I have been managing 100% W@H delivery team for the past 2 years.
See you then!
In the meantime, it will be interesting to hear your views as a short comment to the below questions:
Do you think employees still want to come into the office?
Sr. Project Manager - Global PMO, at Concentrix, a global technology and services leader.
2 年Hi TJ, you've kicked-off an interesting series, as you said it is indeed industry specific however, personally I do believe that WFH isn't just a fad and will stay at least in some form of a hybrid working model in the coming future. The collaboration enabled through tech infused solutions is great to allow not just local but global teams to contribute irrespective of an employee's geo-location. Another key aspect of WFH is that it is driving inclusiveness and empathy within teams and groups, almost everyone is aware of the common challenges of WFH and that's building compassion. The integrity & accountability driven through WFH model is empowering the staff and leading to a more 'mature' and responsible workforce.