The COVID-19 pandemic and our responses to it have fundamentally changed the way we interact with one another. It has changed human behavior and certainly has affected your business. If you could rewind the calendar to January 2020, it’s not likely you’d find too many company CEOs who planned to send all of its employees home to work remotely. This pandemic has already been called “the world’s largest work from home experiment” simply because no one can predict its outcome.
But how has working from home changed? Do companies benefit from changes the pandemic has brought? Let’s take a quick look.
Who Works from Home?
Before the Industrial Revolution, most people worked from home. Farmers farmed and doctors doctored, while barbers, blacksmiths, and others worked from their homes, sometimes with room set aside for a small retail business. However, toward the end of the 19th century, people began working away from their homes. The textile industries brought women into the workforce, while Henry Ford’s assembly line innovations gradually brought men to factories that began appearing all across the nation. Industrialization moved people away from working at home to working in factories and offices. Much more recently, various forms of “flextime” and “telecommuting” have brought people back into their homes to work.
In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 4.2 million employees worked from home, which represented about three percent of the total workforce. Now, during the pandemic, an updated Current Population Survey finds that one-fourth of the 161 million U.S. workers do their work from home. That’s about 40 million people.
What’s Different About Working from Home Today?
One well-founded answer came from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in July 2020. A team there studied the pandemic’s impact on the nature of work. They enlisted more than 3 million workers from North America, Europe, and the Middle East in the study.
One of their key findings shows that communication activities changed as workers began their own personal “digital transformations.” That is, email, texting, video conferencing, communication via Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other digital systems all removed the person-to-person nature of the interaction. As a result, meetings per person increased by 12.9 percent, and the number of people in attendance increased by 13.5 percent. Despite holding more meetings with more people, meeting duration decreased by more than 20 percent — with the overall effect that workers spent about an hour (11.5 percent) less time per day in meetings. The study also found the length of an average workday increased around 8 percent (about 48 minutes) compared to pre-lockdown periods.
NBER reports that these adjustments in communication style might “…help synchronize how information is shared (e.g., by holding a team meeting instead of several one-on-ones),” and that “…expanding the number of email recipients and meeting attendees increases the likelihood that important information is received by all relevant individuals in an organization.”
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While no one can count all the effects the pandemic has had, here are a few of the more notable.
- A report from KPMG estimates that some 37 percent of American jobs could be done remotely.
- Another study from the World Economic Forum found that 98 percent of people surveyed wanted the option to work from home at least part of the time for the remainder of their careers.
- A Glass Door study adds that two-thirds of workers surveyed said they would work from home indefinitely if required by the company. They cited the flexible schedule, ability to work from anywhere, ditching the daily commute, and having more time with family.
- Where a company might have taken months or years to study a major change to its business in pre-pandemic times, some organizations are now moving at “light speed.” For instance, many universities have shuttered their doors and use distance learning to educate their students. Multinational firms have outfitted tens of thousands of employees with laptops and video conferencing accounts. Such companies that respond quickly to an emergency have an advantage from a business continuity standpoint.
- With workers at home, companies can reduce expenses significantly.
- They can cut back expenses on large corporate campuses, multi-story headquarters buildings, district offices spread around the country, and all the infrastructure needed to run a business when people no longer come to the office.
- For those workers who need to come to the office from time to time, hot desking allows workers to take whatever desk is available rather than having one assigned to them. Hot desking eliminates wasted space by allowing companies to downsize their space and optimize the use of existing space.
- A 2013 study by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom studied call center agents, half working from home and half from a call center. He reports at-home workers were 13 percent more productive —a clearly significant increase. Remote workers took fewer breaks and sick days and reported greater work satisfaction.
- Environmental. In 2019, U.S. motorists collectively drove the equivalent of 4.8 trillion kilometers, which is enough to make more than 300 round trips to the dwarf planet Pluto. Keeping those vehicles in the garage and off the road during commute times has led to a reduction in fossil fuel consumption and has cut their carbon footprint.
What Coming Next?
Without a crystal ball, none of us can see what’s next, but we do know that having up-to-date communication services during this pandemic — or any other crisis — is essential. We offer communication solutions ranging from hosted PBX systems to VoIP service to phones and accessories. We can help your at-home workforce work smarter and more productively. Call us at (888) 415-3600.
