At first, many thought that the standstill would last for several months. But a year later, millions of workers are still working remotely.
The pandemic has forced a large part of the global workforce to conduct a remote experiment on a scale never seen before – and very has changed over the past 12 months.
The boundary between our work and our personal lives has blurred. Working on the kitchen table has become commonplace and for parents, the daily juggling of virtual school is a daily challenge.
Employers have also been forced to become smarter. They had to weaken restrictions on where employees could work with the tools to support them professionally and personally.
Now that more people are being vaccinated and children are going back to school, it looks like it would return to normal, but the workplace as we knew it could change forever.
And of course, some companies will want everyone to come back.
No matter what the approach, workers and employers can expect to hit some bumps in the road as they navigate the next phase of this grand work experiment.
“Many companies have managed to work remotely in 2020, mainly because everyone did. There was no built-in preference for office workers or stigma over remote workers,” said Andrew Hewitt, senior analyst at market research firm Forrester. “Hybrid is going to make managing this difference more difficult.”
The initial shock
On the industry rating website Yelp, the IT department had to run to find nearly 3,000 laptops for workers. mainly sales workers, when it was remote in March.
“We always had extra laptops, but not 3,000,” said chief personnel officer Carolyn Patterson.
The software company Artificial Intelligence, Coveo, vacated its offices in early March 2020. With more than 600 employees around the world, employees were accustomed to working in different time zones and places. Yet personal collaboration and events are an important part of the company’s culture.
“We were a business that used to get together; people literally fly all over the world … to get together. People need to interact personally,” said CEO Louis Tetu.
From the beginning, the company focused on ensuring that workers are well-equipped at their home office by allowing the purchase of items such as technological equipment and noise-canceling headphones. as well as offering subsidies for high speed internet. And it did not come cheap.
“It meant we’ll give you the best chair, the best screen … which costs us seven figures overnight,” Tetu said.
The cost, he said, was worth it. “You can not build a great company if your people are not healthy.”
But it was not just the logistical elaboration of the homework that challenged employers and their workers at the outset of the pandemic. There was also the mental and emotional toll it took.
“We have realized that our employees come to us for guidance on everything: the pandemic, how they live, to know what is safe and what is not safe,” said Cisco’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, policy and target officer Fran said. Katsoudas. “It has become very natural for us to hold meetings with medical and mental health practitioners and discussions on business strategy, all in the same meeting.”
Some employees have improved their benefits to help employees deal with the changes and uncertainties of the pandemic. offers things like free counseling, childcare and office set-up allowances and increased appointments.
But as far as the post-pandemic is concerned, working remotely will no longer be considered a special benefit.
“It’s no longer: ‘Offering your job remotely?’ But do you present it with enough organization? support so I can be just as successful as the people working in the office? Said Hewitt.
He expects about 60% of businesses to offer a hybrid work model, while 30% of businesses will be back in office and 10% will be completely remote.
Now here comes the hard part
Despite the challenges, Hewitt says the past year has been easy compared to what would come next.
“We worked remotely in easy mode. We all did the same thing, everyone had equal access to information and promotions,” Hewitt said. “It will be harder with hybrid in 2021.”
Inequality between remote and in-office workers can become a problem among hybrid workforce. People in the office get more face time with the boss, which can lead to better relationships, increased access to information and top assignments.
‘There was the stigma [before the pandemic], that remote workers were less productive and career-oriented, ”Hewitt said.
Training managers on how to engage remote and personal workers evenly in meetings and decision-making, as well as how to communicate, is a critical step in comparing workforce.
On Yelp, the majority of employees worked in the company’s offices before the pandemic. The company now gives most employees a choice to work remotely or come to the office a few days a week.
“We’re going to be very careful that drivers don’t change into patterns that you have to come in for an important meeting, because that’s not possible when people move away,” Patterson said.
Workers who move to areas with significantly higher or lower labor costs can have their pay adjusted.
The company has created a three-tier system to handle compensation changes for relocating employees.
“If you go from one place to a third place, you will experience a reduced salary, but we still want to be competitive,” Patterson said.
Coveo also plans to give employees flexibility to choose where they work, but this is so there are no plans to order everyone to be 100% remote.
“It’s very dehumanizing,” Tetu said of businesses that are completely remote and get rid of offices. “I think Slack and Zoom are great, but there is no equivalent to getting people together and cultivating a common culture.”
He is looking forward to the day when he can get his team together safely.
“We are going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on plane tickets to bring everyone together. There is no doubt. There are huge gains and benefits in terms of togetherness.”
As things get off to a normal start and services such as day care reopen regularly, employers, according to Hewitt, are likely to tighten their distance work requirements. This may mean that the employee must have childcare in place during working hours or the standardization of a time zone in which everyone works.
“The other thing that comes up with ‘work anywhere’ is tax laws,” Hewitt said. “It can get tricky and complicated.”
The shrinking office
Businesses are also likely to need less office space as more employees start working remotely.
Tetu expects its business to use about 70% of the square footage it did before the pandemic.
To meet the needs of a hybrid workforce, office designs are likely to look different as well.
Not every worker needs a designated desk. Collaborative spaces are likely to become a higher priority so that more team-oriented work can take place in the office, while individual work will be done at home.
According to Patterson, Yelp is also considering reducing its office space.
“As we grow leases, we’ll go down our footprint,” she said, adding that Yelp’s office space could be redesigned to include fewer desks and focus more on collaboration.
Even as more people are vaccinated, experts warn that it will take time to return to any sense of normalcy work.
“There’s going to be a long tail here, there’s no doubt about it,” Tetu said. “There is a psychological impact of this that is lasting. Life is quite shaken, and there are several consequences of this. ‘