Since the beginning of this crisis, we have been focusing on remote working and its benefits when implemented correctly. From discussing how businesses can support their employees during remote working to conducting a survey on how workers in Flanders feel about continuing remote working in a more professional way, we have truly immersed ourselves in this topic.
And we weren’t the only ones interested in this topic.
Mid-March this year, which signified the start of the lockdown in most Western countries, the search interest of ‘remote working’ on Google trends peaked at 100, up from 40 just one month earlier. This highlights the spike in the popularity of remote working and the general interest in the trend, as a result of this crisis.
But since you’ve heard enough from us on this topic, we scoured the internet to find out what experts have been saying about remote working, and what different aspects they highlighted.
Trust and making the switch
According to the International Labour Organisation, just 7.9% of the world’s workforce (around 260 million workers) worked from home on a permanent basis before the crisis. But as the pandemic pushed businesses to make remote working mandatory during the lockdown, this number swiftly grew on a global scale.
Although millions of people have been working from home for the last few months, some businesses are sticking to their belief that the only way to effectively manage teams is by being in the same space as them. As experts highlight, this transition isn’t always easy.
Job satisfaction and mental health
Remote working and the freedom that it can bring when implemented correctly can also contribute to how employees feel about their jobs and their mental health at work.
One survey conducted at FlexJobs in 2018 showed that remote working (as one of the flexible options at work), can be so impactful that 97% of respondents said that having a more flexible job would have a “huge” or “positive” impact on their quality of life.
Talent retention for talent retention
We have now come to a point where attitudes on remote working have shifted so drastically in the last four months that workers, especially millennials, are setting expectations or flexible conditions as a factor in choosing the right job.
According to Staples’ Workplace Survey, 67 percent would consider leaving their job if the arrangements became less flexible, which is further proof that the ability to work away from the office is increasingly becoming an expectation. Choosing to adapt to these changes or stick to the status quo could be detrimental for the future success of a company.
Corporate shift to remote working
Many large corporates are recognising the need to adjust. At the start of May this year, at the height of the pandemic, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey announced in a company-wide email that he would allow his employees to work from home “forever” where their role and situation allows it.
One week later, world’s largest social media company Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he will permanently embrace remote work, even after coronavirus lockdowns ease, saying he expects that about half Facebook’s workforce would work remotely over the next five to 10 years.
What will the future bring?
Because many of these changes have taken place at such a rapid pace, it is hard to predict what will happen next, and how companies will react once lockdowns start easing. However, many experts believe this trend will continue, and that companies will have to continue their adaption to this new way of working, which allows for more flexibility for employees.
Your partner in professional and safe remote working
Even before this crisis and the resulting worldwide teleworking experiment, we at Workero aimed to help businesses adopt remote working in a professional way with our online platform and our physical coworking spaces.
As we gradually move towards a new normal, of which some form of remote working will be the most realistic way of moving away from full-time working from home, we have further developed our products to assist businesses in implementing remote and flexible working. There are many benefits to choosing Workero as your partner in remote working:
- Your employees will gain access to over 30 corpo-working locations across Belgium
- This allows them to book the ideal desk for their needs
- Through our easy-to-use app or our online platform, these flexible spaces can be booked within a matter of minutes
- Managers can keep track of who is working where through our booking system
- By adopting this flexible and cost-efficient solution and offering remote working options for your employees, you will be a step ahead of your competitors when it comes to talent retention
Furthermore, allowing your employees to work within our spaces also means guaranteeing their health and safety. After extensively researching what steps to take to ensure our workspaces can be safe, we implemented several measures to protect our customers.
The changes in our spaces are in line with several suggestions made by the government as well as by health experts. On the one hand, we implemented measures to stimulate behavioural changes, clearly outlining protocols and reconfiguring open work environments to ensure physical distancing, such as installing plexiglass between desks and placing.
These also include adding clear displays of updated safety, health and wellness information and resources for employees, visitors and occupants throughout the building or office.
On the other hand, the environmental changes we made include temperature control and increasing and toughening our cleaning regimes.
Watch the video below to discover our spaces and how we adapted them to guarantee the health and safety of all our customers!
