Covid-19 Provides an Enormous Opportunity to Experiment Remote Working

As the COVID-19 sweeps the world and countries going into partial or total lockdown, many companies have adopted work-from-home policies in response to the pandemic. Could this be an opportunity to experiment remote-working?

Not so long ago, business leaders saw working from home as a way employees used to skive from work. Interestingly, they are now working from home too.

While the new norm comes with many privileges such as not having to wake up early, minimal office politics, reduced stress from commuting, and spending more time with family, working from home comes with many difficulties.

With each workday, one has to struggle to maintain focus and keep in balance with other priorities such as childcare, house chores, and maintain productivity without dedicated office space and real-time collaboration with colleagues. Besides, some will have to struggle to avoid raiding the whole snack cupboard in a day.

For many, remote working is a new concept and having to work in their bedrooms or shared common rooms, with noise from their partners, family or roommates is something they have never experienced. The “steady-state” of the workplace has now been disrupted.

To start with, working from home will “generate a worldwide productivity slump and threaten economic growth for many years,” says Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” he adds. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”

However, a 2015 study research based on a randomized control trial on 1,000 employees of Ctrip, working from home during a nine-month-period led to a 13 percent increase in performance – almost an extra day of output per week – plus a 50 percent drop in employee-quit rates. The experiment was so successful that Ctrip rolled out working from home to the whole firm. This signifies that other companies can also adopt the model.

With experts projecting more than 1.3 billion people will work virtually within a few years, business leaders have to brace themselves and prepare for this new wave. As a matter of fact, many employees will not be willing to go back to the workplace when this pandemic is over. Long periods such as three months is more than enough for new habits to form.

Working in an office comes with its benefits such as face-to-face collaboration, being part of a community as well as gaining knowledge by watching others do their work.

Very quickly, working from home was invented by freelancers in the early 1980s who explored the possibilities of personal computers in the early days of the internet, making the most of the emerging technology.

As easy as it sounds, working from home requires lots of training and discipline. The kind of work you do in an office with people around you is not the same as the work you do on your own and business leaders have to approach this inflection point – an opportunity to change the way we work for the better. COVID-19 pandemic has granted that opportunity.

For first timer professionals, working from home comes with a lack of social company resulting in loneliness, feelings of isolation, depressions and lots of distractions. Hurting their productivity.

According to Bloom, leaders can help stem the productivity decline by making regular check-ins between managers and their teams; maintaining schedules that strive to separate work life from family life, and collaborating with colleagues on video calls rather than phone calls.

While this method may not work in the long-term, business leaders have the opportunity to train their employees on gaining work ethics while working remotely.

One way this can be achieved is by streamlining communication to ensure each employee knows exactly what’s expected of them. Setting up a ready-to-go suite of tools for workers like the chat app Slack or video conferencing app Zoom can also come in handy. For sustainability in the future, companies will have to adopt low-cost collaborative tools that will help in joining everybody up to form armies of virtual co-workers.

For the employed, one must do as much as they can to set up a dedicated workspace at home – with little or no distraction. By doing so, it signals to those who live with you that you’re ‘at work’. Wake up each day, take a shower and get dressed for work instead of lying in bed with a laptop. Just because you can lounge or sleep around in your pajamas with a laptop on your laps doesn’t mean you should. Treat your work with the seriousness it deserves.

For the adopters, the work-from-home policy will come with reduced office expenses for companies as few employees will work on location. However, managers will have to learn new modes of managing and measuring performance. For professionals, one will be able to maximize on their work-time and take up as much as three jobs, increasing their income.

With the uncertainty of how long people will be at home as a result of the coronavirus, business leaders and their teams have the opportunity to pilot a remote working system for their businesses. Traditional office workspace may be on its way to the end, will you survive?