01 Feb 2021

The future of work: will remote working become the norm for office-based employees?

With workforces across the world currently working from home in response to Covid-19, HR and reward leaders have been tasked with the challenge of finding ways to adapt and simultaneously keep business and recruitment moving along. As a result, we have witnessed digitalisation like never before.

Seemingly overnight, organisations and employees have adapted to using digital tools and cloud-based solutions for everything. In fact, without today’s HR technology, working from home would be very different, perhaps even impossible.

How is employee productivity affected?

Before Covid-19, one of the concerns many employers had was how working from home would affect productivity. However, a recent Forbes article refers to a new study in California that tracked employee efficiency. It found a 47% increase in productivity when employees worked from home.

A pre-Covid-19 study, conducted by Stanford University which tracked the performance of 16,000 employees over a seven-month period, found employees were 13% more productive working from home.

Although remote working has always been a debated topic, following government and health authorities’ recommendations for Covid-19, many employers have seen themselves with little choice.

Allowing employees to work from home

To find out more about the current HR challenges and their views around the current remote working situation, we recently conducted a study into How HR Has Been Affected by the 2020 Pandemic. Of the 900 HR professionals surveyed, 89% said they have allowed employees to work from home during the pandemic, while just under 11% have not allowed employees to work from home due to company policies or practical restrictions.

Although, of course, life and work wasn’t always this way, interestingly, 74% of survey respondents say their employees had the opportunity to work from home before the pandemic. However, this was only when necessary and only after receiving their manager's approval.

Making it possible to work from home

Despite the pandemic, HR technology has continued to make recruitment possible. Through benefits administration platforms, recruiters have been able to utilise digital preboarding, onboarding and offboarding tools that exist inside these systems.

From employee apps that allow push notifications to employee phones, online meetings and chat services, in many ways, one could argue that communication between employer and employee has never been better. Don’t miss our five tips for communicating with employees working from home.

What do HR professionals think today?

How have things faired for HR during this period of uncertainty, and have opinions around working from home changed? What will attitudes be like towards remote working when there is no longer the risk of infection, and the necessity to work from home has gone?

More than three quarters (77%) of survey participants say they intend to allow employees to continue working from home if they want to. What about employers who previously did not allow their employees the opportunity to work from home before the pandemic? One in 10 say they intend to offer their employees the opportunity in the future.

So, will remote working be the new norm? See our survey results by downloading our mini-report, How HR Has Been Affected by the 2020 Pandemic.

This article is provided by Benify.

Original article: Is Remote Working the Future of Work?