In the last year, the cloud-workspace or work-from-home has hugely risen in popularity. Due to COVID-19 most employees had to work from home, which required a safe and flexible workspace. Organizations were forced to become flexible and change their way of working. A lot of organizations have decided to embrace the flexible working spaces with the thought that employees will be more productive, motivated and committed.
It did not take long, after people realized that working from home had a lot of advantages. The flexible working environment allows employees to vary their hours or days. People have more flexibility in their days off, work locations, but also work itself has changed due to working online.
Effectivity: Where a lot of travel time to and from work is saved. Additionally, employees can choose their own working hours, which give them freedom to balance work and family. Important family priorities could now be taken care of during the week, and work could be completed in the evening. Flex work made it easy to have meetings during the whole week, where evening hours and weekends were first not possible, now a quick meeting can be done anytime through digital environments such as Zoom of Microsoft teams. Where otherwise, long travel times were needed, to meet a number of people.
Efficiency: working online can reduce operational costs, because less work spaces are needed. Research has shown, that if American federal officials work from home half the time, 25% less office space is needed (Van der Werff, 2021).
Empowerment: the flexibility that is offered can lead to more motivated employees, which will help the companies to improve their operations. It makes it also easier to hire people as a company, as they are more appealing, and can provide jobs for people hours away.
Next to personal advantages, working from home is also influenced by the climate discussion. More and more people are realizing that concessions must be made, to reduce the emissions and save the world. Where the lockdown reduced the emissions of CO2 with 20 percent, company’s realized that a lot of work could be done at home. In new Zealand, flexible work has become the norm in the public sector. Where every job can be done as flexible work, unless there is a good reason not to (Van der Werf, 2021).
It is expected that also after the corona crisis, working from home and flexible work hours will be desired. 26% of the company’s want to focus on implementing flexible working hours even further (Min Infra en Waterstaat, 2021). Although company’s will not switch completely to a full home office, they are thinking about a 2 or 3 day alternative for employees. COVID-19 has forced company’s the way they work, and the long lasting effects will be visible in the working conditions in the future.
References:
Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat. (2021, 19 juli). Onderzoek wijst uit: thuiswerken is een blijvertje. Nieuwsbericht | Rijksoverheid.nl. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/07/14/onderzoek-wijst-uit-thuiswerken-is-een-blijvertje
Van der Werf, K. (2021, 21 juli). Overheidstrends 2021: locatievrijheid. Deloitte Netherlands. https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/publieke-sector/articles/overheidtrends-2021-locatievrijheid.html
Being able to work more flexible is, in my opinion, the one positive outcome of the corona crisis. I agree that we would benefit on effectivity, efficiency, empowerment and on environmental front. I think that this phenomena is here to stay. One other advantage is that the job market will be more globalized as a result. Although it is already happening on a smaller scale.
However, I must admit that I think it would be a pity if working remote is the only option for employees. Having a meeting face to face adds value in some ways that fascinatingly can’t really be replaced by video calls in my opinion. I think that the majority of people missed the social aspects in their life during the lockdowns. Social aspects are a part of working life as well and I think remote working hinders that to a certain extent. I believe that the added flexibility working is great, but that the option to go to the office for closer interactions should be possible when desired.
Nice article! Really interesting to see that there were good things also coming from COVID-19. Some really valuable information, such as the ones you mentioned in the post, has been deduced from this crazy time in the world. I really believe that having a flexible working environment would help people achieve a better work-life balance. For instance, some jobs could occasionally be done from home or collaborations can be done virtually. In this way, employees may also improve their performance when they are physically at work because they have been able to sufficiently rest.
Dear Wim,
Thank you very much for this interesting post. In the last 2 years, almost everyone around the world came across working or studying at home, which can be defined as a revolution. At the first look, it seems that it has a myriad of advantages for the employee since they can organize home stuff and work at the same time so that they will have more time to relax. On the other hand, we must admit that some employees have difficulties concentrating on work and spending whole at home, which has also caused some mental disorders.
From my perspective, a hybrid working system, wherein employees can choose the workdays and home days would be the best solution after Covid-19. It is also undeniable for companies, how they saved their money during the pandemic with working at home (operational costs). However, there some companies, which invested a great amount of money in the infrastructure of the offices. For these companies, it could be hard to switch to a hybrid system and to see their investments are in vain. But from now on, we see that working at the office is old-fashioned.
Hi Wim,
Thank you for this informative blog. I agree with a lot of the points you mention, such as the increasing efficiency and empowerment together with the advantages for our environment. However, I do think there are some challenges as well. For example, learning on the job especially for junior employees who just started their career can be more difficult with managers and colleagues working from home a lot. Moreover, with meetings being mostly online and efficient one may ask oneself if this has a negative influence on creating a safe learning environment.