One effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been a huge increase in the number of Americans working from home. The question is: How many of them will be able to do it when the COVID-19 crisis fades?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An early-April 2020 MIT survey of 25,000 American workers <\/a>found that 34% of those who\u2019d been employed four weeks earlier said they\u2019re currently working from home. Combined with the roughly 15% who said they\u2019d been working from home pre-COVID-19, that means nearly half the U.S. workforce might now be remote workers. And that\u2019s also true, the researchers say, for workers 55 and older.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Brookings Institution\u2019s Katherine Guyot and Isabel V. Sawhill just wrote their take on remote work and COVID-19, calling the pandemic \u201camong other things, a massive experiment in telecommuting<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some forward-thinking employers have taken extra steps to help their employees work remotely during the pandemic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Today In: Retirement<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the recent webinar, Is Self-Quarantine the Fabled Future of Work?, <\/em>co-host Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at the nonpartisan think tank New America, said: \u201cThis virus is calling into question the way we work on such a huge level.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cali Williams Yost, a flexwork expert and founder of the Flex + Strategy Group in Madison, N.J. says that as a result of COVID-19: \u201cWork is forever changed\u201d because \u201cflexible work was made for times like these.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Working from home, research has found, can boost employee productivity, improve work\/life balance and foster better mental health (not to mention reduce pollution from commuters).<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Read all of <\/em>Next Avenue\u2019s COVID-19 coverage<\/em><\/a> geared toward keeping older generations informed, safe and prepared.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Some forward-thinking employers have taken extra steps to help their employees work remotely during the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, according to the SHRM trade group for human resources managers, the Utah-based tax software company Canopy is reimbursing small expenditures like paying for a yoga ball to sit on for better ergonomics. And the New York City commercial real estate company SquareFoot has given employees laptops to use at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Federal and state governments have offered grants and loans to businesses needing to upgrade their remote-work technology, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And many employers (including mine) have started Virtual Happy Hours and Virtual Coffee Breaks, to foster a sense of community and cheer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But, let\u2019s not forget that working from home is \u201ca sign of privilege,\u201d said Schulte, author of the bestseller Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play When No One Has the Time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s mostly something that knowledge workers with computer-based jobs are being told to do. Millions of Americans \u2014 from grocery clerks to ER physicians \u2014 don\u2019t have that luxury. And AARP analysts have noted that many older workers also live in places with lousy broadband access, making remote work difficult or impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also worth remembering: some people who are now working remotely aren’t doing so because their employer likes it, but because it\u2019s become a necessity to get jobs done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neil Webb, a business development director in London, tweeted that he\u2019d recently heard two people note that, \u201cYou are not working from home; you are at your home during a crisis trying to work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, remote work experts like Michael Solomon and Rishon Blumberg, co-founders and managing partners of 10x Management, say the \u201cfuture of work has arrived.\u201d Patricia Strach, interim executive director at the Rockefeller Institute recently said that \u201cthis forced work-from-home experience is showing us that work-from-home arrangements are a viable strategy for many businesses and that this is likely to be true even after the crisis is over.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not so sure about that, though I do think the future of work has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My skepticism comes from the fact that before the pandemic, many employers refused to let staffers work from home full-time or part-time or didn\u2019t allow it and I suspect after it, many will return to their old ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some were dubious about whether jobs would get done if employees weren\u2019t in sight, onsite. That\u2019s a concern many still apparently have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a March survey of HR execs by the Gartner IT<\/a> research firm, 76% said the top employee complaint during the pandemic has been \u201cconcerns from managers about the productivity or engagement of their teams when remote.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Schulte calls these concerns part of \u201cthe facetime culture\u201d of the workplace (as opposed to a FaceTime culture), where you need to show your face in person and where unplanned \u201challway moments\u201d can lead to work assignments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers have also demonstrated that face-to-face work teams perform better than virtual ones <\/a>in creative assignments. During the Future of Work <\/em>webinar, co-host Henry Grabar of Slate attributed this to what\u2019s known as \u201cpsychological safety.\u201d It\u2019s about feeling comfortable expressing ideas with your co-workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen you work online, it can be harder to read people,\u201d Grabar said. \u201cSo, you see a kind of self-censorship.\u201d Added Schulte: \u201cIt takes skill to communicate in a remote setting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, before the pandemic, some employers just didn\u2019t have the tech chops to allow remote work. For instance, According to Routefifty.com writers Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene, only 19% of local governments had any telework arrangements<\/a> for their employees in 2019; fewer than half the states did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But now that work-from-home has been shown to be possible for millions of workers, odds are that when the COVID-19 crisis is over, more employers will let some<\/em> employees do it some<\/em> of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOnce businesses and individuals invest in the fixed costs of remote work,\u201d the MIT researchers wrote in their recent report, \u201cthey may decide to stay with the new methods.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Partly, that will be because staffers demand it after having worked remotely successfully. Partly, it\u2019ll be to reduce the cost of the employer\u2019s real estate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But employers also know that not every worker will want to work from home, either due to tech issues or the lack of sociability. In Buffer.com’s 2019 State of Remote Report, 19% of remote workers called loneliness their biggest struggle with working from home and 17% cited collaborating and\/or communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And employers also know that managing remote workers takes work<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, rather than having either an everybody works in the office policy or an everybody works from home one, look for a hybrid of the two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A New York Times NYT<\/a> article on \u201ctomorrow\u2019s workplace\u201d just quoted RXR Realty Chief Executive and Chairman Scott Rechler as saying: \u201cThere could be A teams and B teams working [remotely] different days.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And in the post-pandemic offices, look for employees to be sitting further away from each other than in 2019 \u2014 with bottles of Purell on every floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Originally posted at Forbes by Richard Eisenberg<\/a>, follow him on\u00a0Twitter.<\/a>\u00a0Check out\u00a0his\u00a0website<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/nextavenue\/2020\/04\/10\/is-working-from-home-the-future-of-work\/#2183b42b46b1<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One effect of the coronavirus pandemic has been a huge increase in the number of Americans working from home. The question is: How many of them will be able to do it when the COVID-19 crisis fades? An early-April 2020 MIT survey of 25,000 American workers found that 34% of those who\u2019d been employed four weeks earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,3,7,8],"tags":[11,12,10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/48"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.remotebharat.com\/resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}‘Work Is Forever Changed’ Due to the Pandemic<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Not Everyone Can Work From Home<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Skepticism About A Post-Pandemic Work-From-Home World<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What Employers Might Do Once COVID-19 Fades<\/h4>\n\n\n\n