It seems like a century ago since roaming executives, consultants, and business professionals we were excitedly glued to their Blackberries and video conference rooms as the means to keep in touch. Well, though not a century ago, it was indeed the last century. Since then, Smart Digital Devices (SDD) that enable flexible work has multiplied ten-fold.
Two decades before Covid-19, the stratosphere of virtual work was slowly continuing to expand to include new mothers (and fathers in Scandinavia) easing back into the workplace while caring for their newborns or young children in school due to a lack of adequate daycare or even to a wider population who had the responsibilities to care for sick or elderly parents, and so forth.
Overall, driven by need, women in the workplace were at the forefront of this silent revolution we then called “working from home.”
But the old mentality that employees had to be in an office to be productive started to slip as statistics showed that flexible work hours resulted in added hours of productivity beyond the standard 8 to 10 hours before an employee had to rush out to catch the train or pick up the kids from their daycare.
However, the focus of concern for businesses was still only half the issue – internal employee productivity. The wholesome concept of how we conducted work would be far off in the Covid-19 future.
While “brick and mortar” roles (hospital/healthcare, industrial/manufacturing, certain salespeople, delivery & service industry personnel, and so forth) that require physical presence are outside the scope of virtual work, most people who deliver value by going into an office and working from a computer, can do this from any location with internet connection.
The Covid-19 shutdown brought virtual / distance working to the forefront along with the way many employees came to view work. Two decades of mind-blowing digitization were now front and center of how we could while quarantined. Zoom and other online meeting places became the office. Global carbon footprint shrunk from a drop in mass circulation, dolphins returned to swim openly in the non-polluted waters of Venice, and astronauts in space could see parts of the earth with a clarity never before experienced.
Work-life had changed. Generic talk of the illusive “work-life balance” that was the subject of so many articles and books over two decades was now a reality. The “great exodus” post-Covid-19 saw out-of-touch politicians demagogue the issue, believing that people stimulus checks had emboldened people to quit the rat race.
In reality, it had nothing to do with stimulus. Many people had just reconnected with themselves, their families, and their communities during those many months at home. The gig economy had taken off, and the global talent pool, via new online portals, was decentralized and democratized. The supply and demand of labor had been altered but largely because the structure of work had changed form.
Social theorists will write books decrying the emergence of social isolation and emotional disconnects brought on by virtual office and distance working. But they will have missed the point. Social assimilation starts with communities; emotional connection starts with our families. Neither necessarily needs an office environment to thrive.
On the other hand, virtual working has seen productivity shoot sky-high across industries. Responsible people produce more when they are comfortable – when they can arrange their schedules to accommodate their human needs for family, and social/communal, and leisure activities.
For businesses, virtual working has now globalized the talent pool. It enables a company like Europe Incorporations to seamlessly absorb a company’s transnational process needs into an ecosystem of local experts offered through online portals or legacy offices.
Post Covid-19, research and polls conducted among global employers and employees point to virtual working as a critical factor in the way forward. Among the sentiments are the following results:
- The main reason people choose to work remotely is for a better work-life balance.
- Remote working is now the key to attract retaining talent .
- 97% of employees don’t want to return to the office full-time.
- 74% of professionals expect remote work to become standard.
- Upwards of 70 % of remote workers say they’re more productive when working from home.
- Almost a quarter of workers - 23% of those surveyed - would take a 10% pay cut to work from home permanently.
- 59% of respondents said they would be more likely to choose an employer who offers remote work than those who didn’t.
- More than 70% of workers say that having the option to work remotely makes them less likely to leave a company.
- 61% of employees prefer being fully remote.
- 16-18% of companies globally are now 100% remote.
- The average annual income of remote workers is about $4,000 higher than that of other workers.
Virtual / distance working enables Europe Incorporations to simultaneously operate locally in multiple countries and multiple languages on behalf of its clients without the costly administrative overhead in each country, therefore passing such savings on to its clients through its pricing.
