Are Remote Jobs Here to Stay?
One of the major questions people have been asking since the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns is whether remote work is here to stay. This is a legitimate question, especially as many surveys say that employees overwhelmingly want to stay with a remote working model whereas, by contrast, many companies are eager to have their staff returning to the office.
Even some of the big players on the technology sphere like Apple want their employees back in the office, while most would have assumed that they would embrace remote working.
Indeed, some of their own employees had reportedly assumed the same and had gone as far as to move their family home out of the state, only to be told they had to return to work at Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, once the pandemic abated.
Many business titans in the UK such as “The Apprentice” host Sir Alan Sugar have argued in favour of a return to city-centre offices. Some members of the public have rather cruelly pointed out on Twitter that this looks like self-interest from someone with a large city-centre property portfolio, rather than any profound business insight.
The Options for Future Working
There seem to be a few different options on the table for most businesses and they will be influenced differently depending on their differing sectoral pressures.
Return to the Office
Those most in favour of returning to the office tend to be those with a very top-down management structure. These are often the large corporate players where micromanagement of employees was rife prior to Covid and they really struggled with the loss of control before lockdown, even though employee productivity increased.
Those most in favour of a full return to the office tend to be those who have built large corporate headquarters that they need to be seen to fill, or they will lose face. Building a corporate HQ that lies empty is not the kind of look that those who wish to be seen as business-savvy visionaries would like to cultivate for themselves.
Work From Home
Many smaller firms have seen an opportunity with home working to move to smaller business premises or to do away with a central hub altogether. This means they can save money on renting a city-centre location and massively downscale their costs.
There are many employers who see it as the missing piece in their jigsaw puzzle as it allows them to gain experienced staff from competitors who are trying to back away from the work from home model in favour of hybrid working, which they hope will lead to a full return to the office.
The employers who are seeing a benefit from this understand that they are tapping into what the majority of workers want and are determined to make the most of this advantage in often very competitive industries.
Working from home has allowed employees to do away with a lengthy commute and experience the extra energy that this has given them. They have appreciated being able to spend more and better time with their families and don’t want to return to the office.
Hybrid Working
This is the option favoured by many employers who have recognised that many of their employees are implacably opposed to things returning to how they were. Hybrid working usually means two or three days of working from home with the rest of the time being spent in the office environment, being steeped in the office culture all the while. This is very much a compromise solution between those who are desperate to maintain the gains they have received from working from home and those who want them to return to the oversight that comes in an office environment.
Some of the employers want to move to hybrid for a while and then gradually phase it out, others would like to see hybrid working stay as it would seem to offer the optimum solution for both accountability and productivity.
There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of potential for future agreement between those who hold contrary positions on the matter and it may be that hybrid working becomes the “stalemate” temporary position between working from home and returning to the office for a few years.
Fully Remote
Many younger businesses are happy to go fully remote, with no requirement even for people to work from their home, as long as they have internet access and do the requisite amount of work. This means that they can work from co-working spaces, coffee shops, even temporarily relocating to other countries if they fancy travelling and seeing new places while they are working.
This seems to be considered quite a radical view and employers who offer a fully remote option are likely to be able to have their choices of the top talent in their industry. Generation Z seems to feel especially strongly on this matter and wants to embark on even more elaborate adventures such as workations and remote years.
Workations and Remote Years
A workation is essentially a cross between work and a vacation. You work your normal hours but spend your time in a nice hotel in a warm country, taking the occasional break for a dip in the pool. The attraction is that you are paid your normal rate during this time and it doesn’t eat into your vacation days. It is thought that workations can increase productivity and creativity, provided the employee gets the work-life balance right on the trip.
A remote year is when an employee takes 12 months to travel the globe with like-minded individuals through an organisation that takes care of all the logistics. These tend to be organised trips and the accommodation is already selected. Each destination comes with a prepaid place at a local coworking in each of the 12 cities. The main idea seems to be getting to know places you have never been to before while also getting your work done and learning new things from those you are travelling with.
Read some of our inspiring career stories?
