Working from home is the new norm. But is it here to stay or is it just a temporary solution to the COVID-19 pandemic? It is important to take all these factors into consideration while planning for hiring in 2021. Will this global remote-work experiment completely change the way we live and work from now on? Let’s find out.
Did you know? Remote work is a sought after benefit! Research done by Gallup, just a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic, found that 54% of office workers would be willing to quit their job for one that allows them to work remotely.
The COVID-19 pandemic then struck and forced millions of people all around the world into their homes and left all of us with no other choice but to work remotely.
So what will happen after COVID-19? Some employees will definitely go back to offices, but some, if not most, might want to keep working remotely.
According to a recent Gallup research three in five (59%) of U.S. workers who have been doing their jobs from home during the coronavirus pandemic would prefer to continue to work remotely as much as possible. In contrast, 41% would prefer to return to their workplace, as they did before the crisis. And 99% of people say they’d like to work remotely at least some of the time for the rest of their careers.
So it seems that not a lot has changed. More than half the employees still want to work remotely, even after the pandemic. How should you as an employer react to that? You will have to adapt. A recent research by Gartner found that 74% of companies they surveyed expect some of their employees to continue working remotely even after the pandemic ends.
Employers will have to find ways to make working from home work, especially because the future work-from-home scenarios will be very different from the pandemic one.
Now that both employers and employees have gotten a taste of managing working from home, we are equipped to do it better. We have invested time and effort in setting up our home offices, and making the necessary arrangements to have a conducive work environment at home.
This is why almost half of the employees would like to continue working from home even after the pandemic. Other reasons why employees would want to work from home is because it allows them to save time on an everyday commute, have a better work-life balance and perhaps even be more productive.
In a recent Citrix-One-Poll study of 10,000 global employees, 69% of respondents report that they are more focused and productive when working from home than they are in the office
Increased productivity is definitely a great benefit for employers. But allowing employees to work from home has many other benefits for employers, such as reduced office costs, access to a wider talent pool, higher retention rates, etc.
Top companies know they will have to offer remote work if they want to keep top talent in the future. Microsoft has already stated that remote work is here to stay. Facebook and Google have extended working from home to 2021 and Twitter’s CEO has announced that their employees can work from home forever!
Companies have to be prepared for that if they want to remain competitive in the market and keep their current top performers while also attracting new talent.
