Thanks to recent current events due to the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, many employers gave their employees the option to work from home. Initially, the concern was about safety, but businesses have discovered that remote work results in improved employee performance and productivity. Remote work is a relatively new practice, but with such great results, it’s steadily being adopted by more and more businesses.
The remote and at-home workforce grows more prominent with every passing day. This growing vocational trend has many people asking questions. What is remote work? What are the benefits? Should I work remotely? Is remote work or at-home work the working style of the future?
What Is Remote Work?
Remote work is the practice of working from an area that is not the traditional business space. Instead of working in a designated building or office space, employees can work wherever they’d like. Virtual work is an excellent alternative to the traditional working style, which implies that an employee must be in a workspace to be productive. Remote work allows employees the freedom to complete their work on their own time, in their own way.
Benefits of Remote Work
While remote work can be challenging at times, the good outweighs the bad. There are so many benefits of working at home or in a nontraditional working environment. Remote work has been proven to improve workers’ physical and mental health, and alleviate stress, prolonging their lives. By cutting the costs of commuting and building upkeep, remote work saves both the business and the employee money. This work promotes productivity in unique individuals instead of diminishing their creativity as an office space would. Remote work also promotes team and location diversity, which is ideal for a successful project.
Other Benefits Of Remote Work Are:
- Improves employee mental health and well being.
- Alleviates unnecessary stress.
- Reduces building expenses and commuting costs.
- Increases employee productivity and performance.
- Allows for better professional-personal life balance.
- Location independence.
- Promotes diversity.
The Rise of Remote Work
The first corporate office was created in 1560, and since then, the business world has only grown. Offices took off in the early 1900s upon the invention of the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, and, of course, public electricity. In 1968, the first cubicle was invented, forever changing the professional office layout. There wasn’t a need for remote work until the 1970s when people became more aware of the environment. Concerned with the impact of gas wasted going to-and-from work, people started pushing for remote work options.
When the internet was born in the 1980s, and so was the home office. In the year 2018, the number of fully-remote companies grew from 26 in 2014 to 170. According to Toptal, 70% of the world’s population worked from home at least one day a week. In 2019, Zoom, a web chatting service reported 50,800 customers (a five times increase from 2017).
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic changed the working world forever. Nearly hundreds of millions of people transitioned from a traditional work environment to remote or at-home work. Time will only tell where it goes from there!
Is Remote Work the Future?
COVID-19 changed the business world completely, taking us into a new era of the professional lifestyle. The mass transition to remote work during the COVID crisis served as a type of experiment for employers, allowing them to test the waters on at-home work effectiveness. Now that it’s been proven that working from home improves productivity, many businesses are jumping on the bandwagon.
As the years’ progress, and communication technology advances, the working world will continue to lean towards remote and at-home work. In an age of innovation, adopting an innovative working style is the best way to keep afloat. Remote work improves worker well being and performance, it saves the company money on building expenses, and most importantly, it’s the way of the future!