Remote work during the COVID-19 outbreak
Originally from the United States, teleworking consists of carrying out professional tasks remotely. Whether at home or in a coworking place, the employee is able to work, as long as he has access to the internet. It was in 1950 that this concept first appeared in America by the mathematician Norbert Wiener. The latter tells the story of an architect who remotely supervised the construction of a building in the United States, using data communications. And it was not until 2002 that millions of teleworkers were recruited in Europe.
With the Covid-19 epidemic, teleworking has taken on a special place in our society. First presented as a constraint, it finally convinced some employees and companies. During the confinements imposed because of the coronavirus, many people had to adopt, sometimes reluctantly, remote-work.
Remote work: workplace culture
Tomorrow's teleworking will not be the one we experienced during confinement. It is therefore the role of the manager that will count a lot in changing the organization of work in a company. “During this crisis, we discovered managers who have individual qualities of benevolence, confidence to allow autonomy and pay attention to people.
“To set up effective teleworking, the employer must first ask himself the question of his management rituals, that is to say how [he] is organized so that people work together.”
Teleworking is a big money saver for employers. Teleworkers are not the only ones to benefit from the advantages of this relocation. For businesses, allowing employees to work from home saves them money. No need to pay for workspace rental, maintenance fees and transportation costs. And as productivity increases, absenteeism rates are reduced completely. Exchanges between colleagues are richer and the causes of distractions such as phone calls and chatting are erased from the picture. In short, teleworking is a corporate culture to favor, if you want to save money.
Optimizing time spent in the office
If we physically go to work our workplace it is not to do what we can do at home. This clearly means that the time spent in the workplace is dedicated to creation and collaboration.
Remote Work Challenges
Remote work challenges reflect workers’ immediate psychological experiences in accomplishing tasks, interpersonal collaborations, and social interactions with family and friends. Four key challenges were identified in the remote work context during the pandemic, namely procrastination, ineffective communication, work‐home interference, and loneliness.
Work‐Home Interference
First, working at home means more interruptions from family, which may negatively influence work effectiveness. Notably, schools worldwide, had been shut down during the COVID‐19 outbreak; working parents, therefore, faced a bigger challenge in balancing work and family roles. In addition, individuals’ work invaded their life domains during the period of working from home.
Ineffective Communication
Remote workers rely heavily on ICTs to communicate and collaborate with colleagues, supervisors, and clients. Especially during the pandemic, ICT‐mediated communications almost become the only option because workers were not able to engage in face‐to‐face meetings.
Procrastination
Procrastination is one of the biggest productivity killers at work. Procrastination is common in the office‐based workplace and it can become even worse when people work from home. Although most participants were committed to working productively as usual, they sometimes were struggling with self‐regulation failure.
Loneliness
Remote working means fewer face‐to‐face interactions with colleagues and supervisors. Given the restrictions on non‐essential social gatherings during the pandemic, people also lost social opportunities to meet their friends or colleagues, which inevitably contributed to the feeling of loneliness. Ten participants indicated loneliness as a challenge,
Are we ready for 100% remote work?
This is also one of the lessons employers have learned from the COVID-19 outbreak. Everyone walks around a telework that would be around two days to two and a half days a week at most. The confinement showed us that employees and companies are not ready for total teleworking, because it considerably disrupts companies.
However, in the near future, we will probably see the emergence of "native teleworking jobs" (100% teleworking) for those who prefer to stay at home.
How many people actually want to work in offices?
From the employee perspective, the shift is massive and very consequential: people are making new choices about where they want to live and creating new expectations about flexibility, working conditions and life balance that can’t be undone. Our Future Forum research of 4,700 knowledge workers found the majority never want to go back to the old way of working. Only 12% want to return to full-time office work, and 72% want a hybrid remote-office model moving forward.
What happens to the workers that remote jobs leave behind?
For those who can work from home (approximately 40% of US workers largely from the higher educated quartile), our daily experience of work will change significantly. Commuters will gain an hour back on average in their day and estimates suggest that post pandemic, some portion of the week will involve working from home – from one to three days a week. A hybrid model is likely to emerge that will try to balance the efficiencies gained by remote work with the benefits of social interactions and to creativity and innovation generated by working in person with others.
But the greatest challenge that we face regarding work is what happens to the other 60% of workers who can’t work from home. The decline in daily commuters as well as business travel has a knock-on effect on those whose jobs support and serve these workers and offices. A full one-in-four workers are in the transportation, food service, cleaning and maintenance, retail and personal care industries. These jobs, often concentrated in cities and lower paid, are disappearing or are at risk of disappearing in the near term. We need to shore up the social safety net and invest in ways to further skills and increase access to education and training for our most vulnerable workers.
A hybrid model: combining remote work with work in an office
For most workers, some activities during a typical day lend themselves to remote work, while the rest of their tasks require their on-site physical presence. In the US workforce, Mckinsey find that just 22 percent of employees can work remotely between three and five days a week without affecting productivity, while only 5 percent could do so in India. In contrast, 61 percent of the workforce in the United States can work no more than a few hours a week remotely or not at all. The remaining 17 percent of the workforce could work remotely partially, between one and three days per week
Among healthcare occupations, general practitioners who can use digital technologies to communicate with patients have a much greater potential for remote work than surgeons and x-ray technicians, who need advanced equipment and tools to do their work. Thus, among health professionals overall, the effective remote work potential is just 11 percent. Even for the same activity, the context in which a job is done matters.
Sources:
https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_dialogue/---act_emp/documents/publication/wcms_745024.pdf
https://www.europe1.fr/societe/quelle-place-pour-le-teletravail-apres-le-coronavirus-4015100
https://iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apps.12290
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/whats-next-for-remote-work-an-analysis-of-2000-tasks-800-jobs-and-nine-countries#
