Working From Home Is It The New Normal?

For many years, in my own marketing business, I worked from home.

I loved it, my home office, my work space and never had a problem with it but the more successful I became, the more I tempered my story about where I worked and while I had space to bring people to meet with me, I often didn’t and went out to meet them instead.

There felt a real stigma to working from home.

Eventually, I took the decision to move out of my beloved home office space into a ‘proper office’ for no other reason other than it’s what I thought was expected of a growing business and for us to be taken seriously we needed to be in a different space!

Well the reality is, we lasted just a few months, I hated it, I hated how it changed everything about me and my business and my mindset about business. I felt as though I lost many of the things I loved about being in business and in reality, commercially we gained nothing only a whole host of extra expenses but most of all, for me, it took away my flexibility to work as and when I wanted and that was important to me.

So all change, I moved back home and never looked back! The story of working from home became part of my business narrative, it became part of my credibility and part of what I attributed my success to.

Fast forward to 2020 and amid the COVID pandemic and never has working from home been more important to businesses and their employees!

Working from home, especially in the UK has long lagged behind other countries where employers have often taken the view point that more ‘shirking than working’ would take place and that productivity would be low and so have actively resisted allowing such flexibility. Its now great to see the UK catching up, despite it being forced upon many employers, with more and more bosses now measuring performance based on output rather than hours in the office.

It’s amazing how much things have leapt forward because of COVID and in such a short space of time. I was listening to a podcast recently where the UNCLE founder, Ryan Prince, was speaking about his journey and heard a statement saying that COVID hasn’t really changed things, it’s just accelerated what would have happened anyway. It’s an interesting thought.

So with a massive rise since April from 6% to almost 50% of those working working from home and in a study carried out by academics at Cardiff and Southampton Universities, Nine in 10 workers who have worked from home during lockdown would like to continue in some form., the space to work has become incredibly important.

The new home working revolution will undoubtedly see priorities change for those looking for new living accommodation, especially Millenials and Gen Z who have had a taste of the flexibility it brings and here at UNCLE we are already seeing more and more potential customers asking questions about apartments with space to designate to workspace and a focus on co working spaces and work pods with communal WiFi being high on the tick list of those potential renters too.

The idea of floating between your home, the office, whether in your apartment or in a co work space, off to the gym and back again is fast becoming the ideal.

I think it’s a case of watch this space on this one to see how things develop.

Will we ever go back to the ‘old style’ of working or will working from home be absolutely the ‘new normal’ for many businesses?

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TWO.Marketing

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