Will Covid-19 Change The Future Of Remote Work Forever?

by The Scalers Offshore Development Teams In India

COVID-19 has changed how businesses operate. With almost every organization globally imposing a mandatory work-from-home policy, there has been a sudden, overnight, and en masse switch to remote digital work, like never before.

Does this abrupt move have the potential to change how remote work is perceived? What does this mean for businesses? Will COVID-19 prove to be the tipping point in the future of remote teams? Let’s find out.

Remote Work Before COVID-19

The Global Workplace Survey 2019, defined “flexible working” as either working from a different city/country, working from home, or working with no fixed hours. Over 75% of the respondents of the survey considered flexible working as the “new normal.”

Over the last decade alone, remote work in the US has grown by over 91%. And there are significant advantages to this. For instance, according to CoSo Cloud, 77% of remote employees say they’re more productive when working from home. A survey by Atlassian showed that 76% of the respondents prefer to avoid their office completely when they need to concentrate on a project.

This clearly proves that remote work has grown steadily, and for good reason, as companies of all types — private, public, nonprofit, or startup — continue to recognize the bottom-line benefits of integrating remote teams into their business strategies.

Leading up to COVID-19, these measures showed great promise in changing how we work, and at a pace where the transition would be seamless, uncoerced, and beneficial to all. However, today, we are an unwitting part of the world’s largest remote work experiment.

Are Organisations Ready For This Change?

The abruptness of COVID-19 has left employers in somewhat of a pickle. Many of them must adjust with a lack of equipment and policies, insufficient broadband speeds, missing or inadequate software, lack of cybersecurity measures, and other elements that would require weeks or even months to plan.

And so, where many companies have gradually been testing the remote work waters to see if it can be a possibility for their organizations, they’ve suddenly been dealt with “It’s here. Can we make this sustainable?”

Will they fall back into the “old normal”?

On the one hand, we can optimistically say that remote work is here to stay. However, we still have to explore the possibility that companies may fall back into old habits and stay away from remote work post-COVID-19.

For instance, a small percentage of companies may shy away simply because they find the concept of handling a remote team overwhelming. Another reason can also be that ‘legacy’ industries such as accountancy just don’t have the infrastructure to handle this change, as compared to industries at the forefront of digitalization (in particular new and disruptive entrants) that have flexibility built into their models, making the transition so much easier.