Will working from home be the new norm?
As the isolation period extends for a few more weeks, we are getting used to the temporary ways we adopted to go on with our ordinary day. We encounter the difficulties of being restricted from our usual movement and social interactions, but we are in the process of developing new ways to replace our routines.
In our daily lives, we replaced in-person interaction with our relatives and friends with video calls, we order dinner from one of the restaurants we would visit occasionally, our children are being schooled in virtual classrooms, there are webinars in every topic, free online training from various resources, virtual museum tours, concert halls etc.
In professional life, online video conferences were already in the routine of businesses with overseas offices and clients. Remote working was implemented by many businesses in certain situations occasionally. With the isolation, remote working is now extended to all employees with an office job. The progressing theme is that this way of working is here to stay even after the isolation ends; it is suggested that the remote working will be the new norm.
Will working from home be the new norm?
Parallel with the developments in technology, improved communication and remote collaboration capabilities, the office environment has been evolving with an ever-increasing pace in the last two decades. The limited and expensive office spaces turned employers’ attention to flexible working arrangements such as flexi-time (varying office hours or shifts) remote working or telecommuting and new office designs like open offices, hot desking, standing desks, shared workspaces. Working from home together with other flexible working arrangements have also been the focus of professional and academic research.
A 2014 research by Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development suggested that ‘ only 64% of people worked at the same desk all the time, 49% sometimes worked at home, 20% on a commute, and 11% at a library or café’. Remote working is an essential concept that both employees and organisations are now accepted as a fact of modern work life, and their outcome on employee engagement has a fundamental impact on the success of the businesses.
Working from home initially presents some obvious advantages for both employers and employees. Employees have more autonomy in their work, better time management, the possibility of saving the time spent on commute. Employers enjoy better-utilised office spaces, reach to a wider talent pool with location-independent hiring and potentially increased employee engagement with the conscious use of this arrangement.
On the flip side, there are a few disadvantages compared to working in an office environment. Employees who do not have the necessary environment at their home can not focus on their work, which in turn lead to a decrease in performance and loss in employee wellbeing.
A major disadvantage for employers is the loss of ability to monitor and control employees. Dustin R. White in his 2018 study ‘Agency Theory and Work from Home’ found that new technologies decreased the cost of monitoring employees during remote work and “ facilitated the change in prevalence of working from home among employees at firms utilizing modern communication technology”. Using the American Community Survey and Census data spanning 1980–2014, he found that the wage differentials between working from home and office workers have shifted from a 26% penalty in 1980 to a 5% premium in 2014.
The physical conditions that employees are working in is one of the determinants of employee engagement. The recent research shows that new office designs such as open office and hot-desking have a negative impact on employee wellbeing and cause a decrease in employee engagement. Working from home, on the other hand, mostly preferred by employees and increase their engagement. Employee engagement is positively related to customer satisfaction and organisational success.
An important point to mention is that the term working from home is used interchangeably with the terms teleworking, telecommuting, remote working and it actually suggests location independence for employees, not locking ourselves to our homes rather than the office. If the isolation extends further, some of the implied benefits for employees will be lost and we will even miss our good old offices.
The Work Foundation’s 2016 report ‘Working Anywhere? A Winning Formula for Good Work’ draws an important conclusion: ‘Personal circumstances and the nature of the job will ultimately determine the potential for individuals to work flexibly or remotely but there is an increasing demand for this and increasing evidence that this can improve productivity and wellbeing’.
The isolation did not present working from home as a new designation, it was already there and was implemented by more and more employers already before the pandemic. But it sure changed the way and magnitude it is applied. Under isolation, all employees doing office work are now in the scope and work is being performed even without opening the offices. With all the technology, high streaming capabilities and robust communication and collaboration applications, we created the new virtual office where the physical office to perform the work is not necessary. This concept may also have some implications on how jobs are defined in the future. First coming to mind is increasing portability of jobs where some roles may be redefined to be done temporary basis and part-time working and working for more than one employer may be more common for employees.
This new virtual office is a new concept, and even after we go back to our normal working designations, this seems to be the way forward that work-life will be evolving into.
Teoman Akyuz, 30 April 2020
This article was published at LinkedIn on 30 April 2020