Is Work From Home the Future of Work?

As the COVID-19 pandemic continued to spread, offices and workplaces around the globe started asking their employees to work from home. This has forever changed the perception of work from home for many employees and employers. Some, like Twitter, have announced the option of Work from Home Forever for their employees.

This makes you wonder, what is the future of work? Is the future of work, work from home indeed?

Let’s take a look at the history of work from home. In 2009, IBM, one of the biggest technology companies, had 40% of its 386,000 employees working remotely. This resulted in a sharp decline in revenue, ultimately forcing management to call all the employees back to the office.

Similarly, back in 2013, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, asked employees to come back to the office, which resulted in a huge furor. According to the company memo, “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings.”

There are many more examples where work from home resulted in declines in business’s revenues resulting in management calling their employees back to the office. But all this has changed due to COVID-19. Tech giants are now talking about employees going completely remote in the years to come with Facebook expecting half of its employees to be remote as soon as 2025. The CEO of Shopify tweeted in May that almost all their 5000 employees will permanently work from home and added that “office centricity is over.”

Work from home has several advantages over the traditional work schedule. It enhances employees’ productivity, foster better mental health, and improves the work/life balance. People can focus better on their work without any distractions from their colleagues. It also removes the time for commute, hence increasing the productivity and time spent on actual work. Employees feel more in control of their schedule, resulting in a better attitude towards work.

With all the talk about the future of work from home, it’s essential to realize that work from home is not all good. Most importantly, not everyone can work from home. According to Schulte, author of the bestseller ‘Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play When No One Has the Time,’ working from home is a sign of privilege.

People working in the tech and IT industry, with computer-based jobs, can efficiently work from home. In contrast to that, millions of others, from grocery clerks to doctors, don’t have the luxury of setting their workstation at home. Nevertheless, we can’t deny that the perception of people is changed towards the future of work. Patricia Strach, interim executive director at the Rockefeller Institute, recently said that “this forced work-from-home experience is showing us that work-from-home arrangements are a viable strategy for many businesses and that this is likely to be true even after the crisis is over.”

Before the pandemic, the majority of employers didn’t let their employees work from home full-time or even part-time. A lot of them were concerned about the quality of work and employee productivity if their staff weren’t onsite to work. But now that people around the globe have shown that work from home is not only possible but for some businesses, its actually productive, the work system as we know it can be forever changed.

After the pandemic is over, employers will continue to let people work from home, either some of the time or full time. This might be because either the employees demand to work from home after successfully doing it for so many months or to reduce the cost of offices and other infrastructure. But not everybody wants to work from home. A study by Buffer, “2019 State of Remote Work”, the most significant issues faced by remote workers were loneliness and problems with communication and collaboration.

So to ensure streamlined operations after the pandemic is over, employers will have to decide on a hybrid approach towards work policies. This can be achieved in numerous ways by having different days of remote work for different teams or different people in the same team. All this will have to be decided by employers after taking stock of what works best for their business and employees. For one thing, the work environment has inevitably changed forever. Whether for good or bad, that’s a question we don’t know the answer of yet.