Q). What products or services benefit from an increase in remote work?

I am not a doctor, nurse, nor more knowledgeable than the average consumer that reads Webmd.com, so I don't have any medical advice about the virus, and my feed has more than I can digest.

I posted this recently and realized after reading through the comments & direct messages that others were thinking about this too, and the following question kept coming up:

"What do you wish you were selling right now?"

In order to answer that, the following set of criteria arose as most advantageous to the customer, and therefore the seller indirectly. They are:

• The technology / service solves a problem uniquely created by the Coronavirus.
• The technology / service must configure within a week, deploy within a day.
• The technology / service must be able to be piloted for free or nearly free.
• There is either nothing to click or users are self sufficient to train themselves.

Then I saw Bill Young's post about Zoom. Check. Zoom makes the cut here, especially given Eric's decision to give it away to a market he knows does not have his competitors installed.

Slack also makes the cut. Deploys fast, obvious use case for right now, and users figure it out on their own.....eventually.

In a followup conversation from my original post:

Sales rep: "Zoom & Slack are probably top 5 or top 10 most obvious that fit the criteria. I am way more curious about the hidden gems."

I am too.

If you know of a technology or service that meets the above criteria, I would love to write about them.

Example: Yva.ai

How to engage: visit https://www.yva.ai/free_remote_worker_test

*Disclaimer: These stats & charts were lifted (with permission) from the Yva website & the views are my personal opinions and not the views of IBM.

"The first chart did not surprise me, but the finding that former office workers are now 4 distinct groups definitely did."

The coronavirus has suddenly swept companies into a new reality - many of their workers are working from home for the first time in their career. For some workers, they’ve been granted the permission they’ve sought for years. On the other hand, some are stuck at the office though they’d rather be at home.

Companies with existing stay at home (“Remote”) workers enjoy a great foundation to build upon. These companies have tools like Slack, Zoom, and more nuanced details like VPN protocols already established. In Yva's data, remote workers in these companies show a very subtle change in what they refer to as “burnout zone index” - the % of employees that exhibit subtle behaviors that correlate to resignation.

No big shift, right? People that were already working from home have shown a 5% increase in unhappiness due to the virus. Not much to look at here.

The next chart tells a much different story for the same exact company.

"There are now 4 distinct office works in the post-virus world." - David Yang, CEO Yva.ai. "When I realized in my own company there was such a thing as an office worker that wishes they were working remote (counter-intuitive cohort), I realized office workers belonged to 4 groups."

At this point knowing what Burnout Index is and how it is calculated might be useful. It was for me. From the website is a graph of the prediction of resignation - I snapped it for you here:

The blue line is net change in activity and the orange line is a predictor of resignation. When the orange line drops below the dates, the person is 70+% likely to leave in 6 months or less.

Every employee has his or her own burnout index data point for each day. Here's a view of a company's managers with a focus on managers that recently turned negative, or already were.

Once you start looking at more and more groups, you'll be tempted to ask simple questions like:

"Are women more burned out than men?" Who can withstand burnout longer - men or women?"(answers: Yes | women)

But looking at the chart this way is still just a snapshot in time. It represents March 15th, 2020.

Naturally, the company asked "when did this shift happen?" and this chart was produced:

Question: “On August 17th, 2019, what did the company do that may have adversely impacted women?"

Answer:  A change in benefits policy removing paternity leave. There were other issues, but the policy change was the match that lit the fire.

Question: What about on March 19th, 2019 for this company? What caused a sudden burnout in 40% of the engineering team?

Answer: A new Engineering Manager was promoted to overall Team Lead.

That's all for Yva.ai. Engage by visiting https://www.yva.ai/free_remote_worker_test

What else is out there that meets these criteria? Drop me a note. I'd love to write about it.

• The technology / service solves a problem uniquely created by the CoronaVirus.
• The technology / service must configure within a week, deploy within a day.
• The technology / service must be able to be piloted for free or nearly free.
• There is nothing to click. Or users are self sufficient and train themselves.