Sorry Employers, Remote Working Is Here To Stay for a While

COVID-19 will be remembered for a lot of things. We became armchair epidemiologists, the world got physically disconnected but digitally more connected, and we appreciated delivery apps. It also showed remote working could work if employers allowed it to.

All surveys point to the massive benefits that remote working offers employees. Flexibility and work-life balance are the top ones. Reduced absenteeism is another (because you can’t fake measurable outcomes). Employees briefly forget commute stress. And budgets became more employee-focused and were less about building facelifts and travel. 

All these benefits overlook a significant fact: remote working is not new. It was once an employee perk. COVID-19 made it a more mainstream benefit, and employees never looked back. 

“COVID-19 may have accelerated the trend, but the trend is real,” claims Marcus Paterson, head of sales for APAC at Storyblok, a headless CMS provider.

Remote control difficulties

Remote working was never meant to be a perfect working model for all. Office workers will benefit the most; frontline service and field workers still need to go to places (although robots are slowly altering this need).

It also comes with a steep learning curve. Navigating blurred borders separating professional and personal lives stressed many. The missed water cooler gossip, the facial expression of your team leader going into a meeting, and other visual cues saw many lose their work-life bearings. 

Managers faced the biggest challenge. Employees out of sight was a difficult pill to swallow for many who were groomed in pre-pandemic workforce management strategies. Many HR controls and policies were also designed with an office workplace in mind; re-engineering these takes time. Meanwhile, they face huge resistance if they use monitoring tools.

So, it is no surprise that many employers are pushing their employees to work at the office and see remote working as a temporary work-from-home (WFH) measure. Does that mean that full remote working will disappear? Not necessarily.

“This question suggests a wide belief that remote working is a passing fad or fashion and we will revert to traditional office bound forms of work. While that will happen in many businesses bound by tradition and belief that face-to-face working is the only ‘true’ form of work, it is here to stay,” says Paterson. 

It takes practice

Paterson notes that companies that adapted well to remote working tend to be those already practicing before COVID-19. It’s one reason why most startups and born-in-the-Web companies embraced this model. 

“Storyblok is one of the thousands of companies that adopted this business model long before COVID-19. There are said to be over 35 million global digital nomads. Just look at the number of countries opening up special visa classes to attract this new type of global worker. I am typing this very email response from a beach in Phuket, Thailand!” Paterson points out. 

Another area where we are slowly learning to get better is measuring employee productivity. Many HR departments are calibrating their HR measures to be more outcome-based. There are also other measures we used to overlook that are now becoming important. 

“We measure outputs, not inputs. We trust people to do their job. We are checking in as managers regularly and ensuring they know they have our support. If they are not producing the outputs we expect, we jointly figure out why and provide the training or support to get output back on track,” said Paterson.

Some surveys, like the two-year study by Great Place to Work, already show a marked increase in productivity because of remote working. However, this should be tempered with a dose of reality, as this Forbes article suggests. After all, a lazy employee at the office will not become productive just because of remote working. 

Low on trust

For some managers, such laudable results and research are not convincing. One insurance manager says that he was taught that if you are not on the phone in the office, then you should be outside meeting clients. “We’ve met our targets, and that’s proof that this approach works,” he adamantly claims. 

Paterson thinks differently. “Employee effectiveness is not about observing that someone is at their desk with their head down...that is not leadership,” he argues.

Whittle it down to its elements, and you will see the resistance to remote working is really about employee trust (or rather distrust). For remote working to work, employers need to trust their workforce to give them the outcomes they seek and be ready to recover and self-reflect if there is a breach. 

Another reason for the lackluster support from middle managers is the additional workload on them. Being an immediate boss no longer requires you to meet the numbers. During COVID-19, they needed to look for employee stress clues, be better career coaches, empathize with mental health issues, and still deliver results. “If you don’t support your remote workers well, they simply move to an employer who does,” he added.

So why not get employees back to the office where such support is already available? 

Paterson feels that this is where technology is shifting the conversation.“Remote workers love the independence and self-determination. They push managers for more training and better support, like online tools or any tool that can make them more effective. And the market is booming with these tools,” he said. 

Sharing shared purpose

Building shared purpose is one area where remote working can make it challenging. Here, we are only starting to scratch the surface, as this HBR article hints. 

Paterson believes employers must continuously rethink how to build a culture instead of assuming that it forms if everyone congregates in one place. Many analysts believe we took shortcuts for culture development using the workplace as a destination. COVID-19 just exposed the gaps and forced many companies to re-examine what company culture really is. 

“Hybrid and remote work hasn’t necessarily changed our culture. It’s changed the way we experience culture,” says Alexia Cambon, Gartner’s director for HR practice. 

So, companies had to go the extra mile. It showed the value of having a proper framework and practices and engaged management. “We feel connected despite the distance. In addition to company and team events online, we are also matched with other team members in random coffee chats where we get to know someone we don’t typically work with. Throughout 2022, the individual teams had meetups in cities around the world to get to know each other better, and in 2023, we plan to get the entire company together for a team meetup,” Paterson adds. 

Talent will help remote working to win

For all the challenges that remote working poses, there is one benefit that will see it remain. And that’s access to global talent. 

The truth is that companies can’t get hold of enough talent. The nature of work is transforming fast, and you need new skill sets to adapt. Even CHROs are fighting against other departments for analytics and data talents as HR becomes more of a service organization within a company.

COVID-19 gave companies a glimpse of what is possible when hiring remote talents and gig workers to support in-house teams. Many of these initiatives were started by HR as a hiring strategy for permanent workers. But remote and gig workers wizened up, especially those in highly-sought after lines of work. They want to continue to have the flexibility (maybe even to take on other gigs). And so, HR teams had to relook at their policies. 

Remote working also allows companies to tap into vast talent reserves across the globe, plug in their talent gaps, and become more competitive. “Companies struggling to attract talent to their traditional workplaces might find this an attractive and economical way to source the talent they need to keep growing,” says Paterson.

With the talent supply reaching critical stages in key value-driving positions, employers may have no choice but to support remote working next year and beyond.

Winston Thomas is the editor-in-chief of CDOTrends and DigitalWorkforceTrends. He’s a singularity believer, a blockchain enthusiast, and believes we already live in a metaverse. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/bee32