The future of Life @ Work

The COVID-19 pandemic has given us a new address to the workplace i.e. home. It begs of us to question if remote working is the new normal.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered many aspects of people’s lives and livelihoods, some of which are probably here to stay for a very long time to come. The need for social distancing has compelled many businesses to explore working from home that has authorized them to protect their employees, customers, and communities of people that are dependent on them. The COVID-19 pandemic has a huge effect given a new address to the workplace; home. It begs of us to question if remote working is the new normal.

A recent article published by Forbes shared that a California based company had witnessed a 47% increase in productivity due to its employees working from home during the ongoing pandemic. Similarly, a leading Indian business publication also presented anecdotal evidence that the Indian IT industry has switched to a remote working environment, with its employees either working from homes in metropolitan cities or small towns. It shall be interesting to observe the performance of leading Indian IT companies like TCS that have migrated to a new model of remote working with 75% of their employees across the globe working from home and only 25% of them working from office locations. There are many changes which we will see in this new normal:

Better Work-Life Integration May Pivot People’s Preferences Towards Remote Working 

It has also allowed employees to explore ways to work with flexibility and find better work-life integration, which was not possible in the old model.

Remote Working to Make Workforce More Inclusive; to Boost Diversity

The new normal of remote working should also ideally give way to more inclusive and diverse workplaces by virtue of zeroing down the gap for many individuals who may have not been able to join the workforce due to location or personal constraints. Similarly, it would also allow young mothers to access greater opportunities to work and thus help businesses to improve the participation of women in the workforce and the economy.

Trust and Collaboration to be Challenging, New Models of Employment to Rise

It shall require businesses to explore new ways of managing teams to accommodate the reduction of in-person time, engage remotely with employees, create trust, and drive collaboration.

Leaner Structures to Necessitate Greater Autonomy and Accountability of Leaders

Many businesses are trying to become leaner, and in the process making their organizational hierarchies flatter. This implies that power distances in organizations in the post-COVID-19 era are deemed to get shorter, with team leaders having greater autonomy to leverage existing human resources. On the other hand, it also implies while leaders will be encouraged to run their teams independently, they shall also be required to have greater accountability for the manner in which they shall choose to respond to local risks, challenges, and opportunities. 

Greater Mentor-ship and Empowerment of People

This in turn means that organizations in the post COVID-19 era will have to be more objective and outcome-oriented in their approach towards performance management. There will be a greater need for mentoring and coaching as leaders shall look to create more distributed teams with greater on-ground empowerment at the point where the corporation meets the customer.

Plan for digital processes and data security risks

The lock down caused by the COVID-19 pandemic had allowed large corporations as well as small businesses to run a pilot project and conduct trial runs of their digital infrastructure, IT systems, communication, data security and collaboration platforms and realized several benefits of transitioning to working from home, which should eventually allow them to scale up and adopt the model in the long run. 

Looking Ahead: The Future of Remote Working and Digital Preparedness

We may witness the rise of a new paradigm of competitive advantage based on the digital preparedness of corporations and its consequent effect on their ability to stay operational and relevant amidst disruptions. For businesses to insulate themselves from disruptions they need to adapt to more digitized workflows and look to migrate the location of their workplace from brick and mortar infrastructure to a cloud-hosted address.