Navigating Remote Work: Overcoming Challenges for Remote Employees
Remote work is basically employees working from home or from any other place apart from the office. Such locations include an employee’s home, a co-working or other shared space, a private office, or any other place outside of the traditional corporate office building or campus. For employees who can complete work anywhere, this arrangement can help ensure work-life balance, access to career opportunities or reduced commutation costs.
Remote Working Employees – Advantages
- Decreased or eliminated commutes: The major advantages of employees working remotely is they tend to spend less time on travelling to office. An employee spends 30 minutes commuting each way would save five hours a week by working at home, in addition to saving on transportation costs.
- Recruiting and hiring advantages: The organizations enjoy the hiring criteria as the companies don’t need to offer any relocation packages to the employees. This can be particularly beneficial to any hiring manager operating in an especially competitive local labor market or facing skills shortages for roles.
- Need for office space: Organization with remote working employees usually require less physical office space which means to them more savings in terms of employee cost and flexibility.
Remote Working Employees – Challenges & Solutions
- Less Productivity: In the absence of any clear guidelines or policies employees lose their confidence which will lead them to reduce their productivity.
- Best Practice: Productivity in any organization depends on the structure followed in the organizations. A structure can be created by defining clear roles and responsibilities to the employees along with the timetable to be followed.
- Communication: While working remotely employees lack in communication with other employees before any important meeting as the face-to-face interaction disappears.
- Best Practice: The communication should happen regularly by the managers. They should block certain times of the day for small meeting with the employees working remotely.
- Social Belongingness: Social belongingness helps the workers to interact with their co-workers daily. Isolation from others can impact people’s mental and physical well-being, plus a sense of “unbelonging” to their organization.
- Best Practice: The best way to deal with these is to build social connections along with planning remote interactions which will provide them a sense of encouragement and emotional support.
Key Remote Work Statistics in 2022
Trends in Remote Work Growth in US
How has remote work changed during the pandemic?
As per the Current Population Survey (CSP) In May 2020, 48.7 Mn people, about 35% of the employed workforce in the country, reported that they had worked from home in the prior four weeks because of COVID-19
According to the recent Mckinsey study its is estimated that 29% of the work in USA could be done with no productivity loss, and an additional 10% could be done remotely if needed.
Who will be most affected by remote work?
Specific professions and industries will be most affected directly. Professional industries will be most impacted because most of their occupations currently involve extensive remote work. Additionally, these workers anticipate maintaining the opportunity to work remotely at least occasionally. As has been mentioned, most industries that produce things and many industries that provide in-person services do not allow for remote employment. But even in these professions, there was some remote work done during the epidemic, and even if it will be done from a smaller base, we anticipate that some of that flexibility will still be present.
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
Employment in emerging economies is biased toward manual labor-intensive jobs in industries like manufacturing and agriculture. In the emerging economies we examined, there is a reduction in the possibility for time spent working remotely to 12 to 26%. For instance, the workforce in India could only work remotely for 12% of the time without losing effectiveness. Although India’s high-tech and financial services sectors are well-known internationally, the great majority of its 464 million workers are employed in areas like retail services and agriculture that cannot be performed remotely.
Conclusion
It is quite unlikely that remote work will return to its pre-pandemic levels. According to pre-pandemic estimates, around one-third of work can be performed remotely without suffering significant productivity losses, which is comparable to the proportion of employees that left their jobs during COVID-19. This past year, a lot of employees and businesses had to learn how to implement remote work. Moving forward, both sides support keeping some of the flexibility that the pandemic initially demanded. Future opportunities to combine remote and in-person work more easily than under pandemic constraints and forced on-the-job learning during the pandemic are likely to make remote work more productive. Working parents will profit from the reintroduction of in-person education and childcare after the pandemic.
Other changes to the labour market will result from an increase in remote work. The transportation, leisure, and hospitality sectors will be under pressure from remote work, particularly companies like airlines and downtown eateries that serve commuters or business travelers. Offices could shrink and possibly relocate to suburbs or smaller cities from larger cities.
This change will influence workers’ compensation because distant workers are more prone to sustain various work-related ailments. It will be crucial to consider the shifting injury experiences of millions more workers who will merely work from home a little more frequently after the epidemic than they did before, in addition to full-time remote workers and those enrolled in telecommuting schools.
Author: Sonu Kumar Sah