Remote Work | Are distances an obstacle to work

Remote Work, Are distances an obstacle to work? As long as one basic assumption still applies, the existence of the office was safe for all employees. An imposing building, offices designed according to happy employee surveys, a well-known coffee shop on the ground floor and bringing teams together in a huge, majestic physical space. Our offices were the usual and most efficient and secure way, known for all the technological infrastructure they need to process all kinds of data according to the working principles of the companies.

In fact, with its glass walls, we all started the day with a smile, sometimes sincere and sometimes forced, or with closed doors, they would easily support face-to-face communication. In this complex spatial division of labor, it has become a great unknown for everyone how to manage the workflow and team dynamics that will be disrupted by the transition of bosses and their employees to hybrid work.

Remote Work, Are distances an obstacle to work?

Now, potentially, is the time not only to rethink which parts of the job are done in the office and which are done at home, but also to ask some fundamental questions about how we organize our working lives. A lot has changed for everyone in the last three years, and we’ve all had plenty of time to think about what’s working and what’s not working in our jobs and office lives. This reality has also surfaced to mean that a return to the office should not just be a return to work as usual.

While some companies continue to refuse at “The Great Resignation” and insist that employees come back to the office, business gurus are very clear that writing is already on the walls of business life, and this article tells us, “Remote work is permanent.”

According to the predictions of Ladders, one of the leading international research organizations, after the silent resignations that started especially in America and spread to the world reached serious statistical values of 25 percent by the end of 2022 in all professional business circles, these silent resignations will continue to increase in 2023 for the transition to the remote working model. The momentum shift in these business models is described as the biggest societal behavior shift in the tech world since the Second World War, let alone smartphone and screen addiction.

Co-working spaces

As we enter 2022, the last year of the long-lasting pandemic, the feeling of burnout of employees in business life has reached an all-time high. According to the American Psychological Association’s Work and Well-Being survey, 79 percent of the thousand 501 employees experienced stress related to their current jobs. Three in five employees said work-related stress caused them to lack interest, motivation and energy at work. A total of 36 percent experienced cognitive fatigue, 32 percent had emotional exhaustion, and 44 percent had physical fatigue. The results of the researches showed a 38 percent jump compared to 2019, just before the pandemic entered our lives.

Although the Covid 19 pandemic has certainly increased the pace of social adoption of remote work, the reality is that the remote working model has already become a popular trend due to the influence of parameters such as developing technology and the consumption of resources.

Co-working spaces, open offices, co-opt-in co-premises were all used as business spaces before the pandemic, and with a growing number of digital nomads and remote workers leveraging these flexible solutions, they are all available when needed and required.

By 2023, remote working had become the norm and was widely accepted as a fixture in the mainstream. Now, even employees who are looking for a job or the managers who are offered a job put the working model at the top of the important job criteria.

Pandemic Effect! How to Remote Work?

Before the pandemic, many businesses were hesitant to allow their employees to work from home. Some didn’t trust their employees to work unattended, others feared productivity would drop, and more businesses weren’t willing to invest the time and money they would spend implementing systems that would allow remote work to be deployed.

Now, as an increasing number of employees begin to offer timesheets for the hours they work instead of working in the office, from the comfort of their homes, all of this has changed.

While many businesses started to embrace the idea of working from home from time to time or on certain days of the week, which we call hybrid, the number of remote workers was not what it is today. The pandemic has forced many businesses to close their doors and operate in a remote capacity. Due to the pandemic, many businesses have no choice but to embrace remote working and build systems to facilitate this new way of doing business.

Many businesses have suffered greatly during the pandemic and are still actively looking for ways to reduce their overhead costs in order to get their companies back on track. Another consideration is that with the remote working model, business owners can avoid paying expensive office rent, buying office furniture and equipment, and buying office supplies. It can also save on building maintenance, cleaning costs and other costs associated with running a real-site business. In fact, many businesses are starting to realize the cost benefits of remote work, which is a concern for tertiary businesses in city centers going forward.

The Critical Role of Employee Satisfaction

Around the world, sociologists and psychologists continue to try to repeat the same things every day and make their voices heard, like tin cars. When your employees have more flexibility in their work schedules, they will be able to be more successful in their time outside of work. When employees recover at the same time every day by not having to commute to work with traffic ordeal, tension of catching up; it can be used to focus on personal goals, spend time with family, exercise, or do anything else that adds joy to your employees’ lives. When all the working people are happier in their lives outside the office, they will be happier and more productive at work.

Research shows that employees who work from home are 40 percent more productive and 35 percent more productive than those who work in-house. This makes it inevitable that the remote working model will be adopted and become the new norm.

Today, three out of every ten businesses in the world allow their employees to work remotely, but that number is expected to grow in the coming years as more businesses embrace the benefits of remote working and implement strategies that allow their teams to work remotely on the go.

Remote workers of Twitter! To Remote Work

The most spectacular example to be given when it comes to remote work; Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, as part of ongoing cost-cutting measures within the company, closed Seattle offices and Singapore authorized units, instructed employees to work remotely, banned remote work after taking over Twitter in early November, claiming that remote workers only “pretend to work,” and even many examples of layoffs. These events also occupied the agenda quite a lot.

But as a result, Twitter’s great “Musk” was forced to open his arms again to his employees who were evaluated for their critical positions who were fired with a public apology.

We recommend companies that see improved performance after implementing remote work to investigate what the real source of these improvements is.

If you have an employee who painstakingly answers emails outside of office hours, don’t be surprised if they get bored and leave despite having the “option to work remotely and have full autonomy to manage their own time” and your job posting attracted them in the first place. In the current business environment, it’s not the business model that matters, but how you implement it and whether you increase employee satisfaction.

Great Resignation

For business leaders, here is the advice that helped my own company triple the number of employees during the “Great Resignation”:

Have honest, inclusive discussions. Check your pulse and remember that it’s crucial that employees can tell what’s on their minds without fear of reprisals (for example, share the challenges of remote work without worrying that management will interpret them as a signal to force everyone back into the office).

Use a time-tracking approach. Time tracking can help both remote and in-office employees see exactly how much they are working and when they need to take a break. It sets clear boundaries, imposes responsibility, and provides full working flexibility.

Update your company benefits. A ping-pong desk is no longer enough to make your employees happy. But mental health initiatives, from free therapy sessions to mental health days, are becoming risks on the table.

If you ask without hesitation, you can see that many of our white-collar friends are knocking on the psychologist’s door and are looking for answers to the questions of how to eliminate their lack of life energy and regain their old joys.

Face-to-face employees. How to Remote Work

Remote workers and face-to-face employees each have a slightly different value priority when thinking about their happiness at work, which helps explain their different business arrangement choices.

For example, the desire for autonomy is more important to remote workers than to those who work face-to-face, and may be directing some of the self-choice to jobs that can be done remotely, compared to jobs that require employees to come into the office.

Discuss, listen and experiment; do it all from a long-term perspective because if we borrow one of the most popular idioms of recent years, smile, this is the monster we call the new normal!

As a result, with an approach that has spread around the world, especially in these dark first months of 2023, senior corporate executives will likely use the economic downturn to make a final attempt to support their efforts to persuade employees to return to the office.

Employees who have the ability and talent to do business

It’s illogical to imagine these relatively traditional managers rubbing their hands together in anticipation of a brief economic slowdown in the future, but using a softer job market as leverage to bring employees back into the office may be a popular strategy. But top talent that companies around the world can’t give up has already made up their minds. With human expectations and rights being eroded and even social media pressure and awareness, the bosses of old are the current practitioners of today.

In summary, although the bosses’ dreams of returning to the permanent office are the love of hearing the sounds of those ding dong in the entrance queue of the security cards around 8:55 at the latest, the employees who have the ability and talent to do business are the ones who hold this decision whistle in their hands.

While embracing the new world order of 2023 with its different conflicts, it seems that the distances that cannot prevent work will continue to be overcome with our best friend technology. While technology cards are being redistributed every day, companies that keep up with the age are directing talented employees to be happy, and thus the leverage effect on economic stability.