The Pros and Cons of the Remote Workplace
Published on : Wednesday 06-07-2022
Does the Remote Workplace hold the capability to disrupt established business culture and work practices, ask Nikhilesh Naik and Pallavi Bothra.
With the rapidly changing norms for developing an ideal workplace, the concept of Remote Working is gaining traction in the global corporate sector. Remote Working is a concept where employees can do their work from locations outside their office premises at their convenience. The rise of the start-up culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s was a driving factor for promoting this concept as several startup entrepreneurs had limited capital and owning an office space was not an option for them. Several organisations are working on the concept of Remote Working, which has given rise to the concept of a remote workplace.
Though this concept achieved traction during the pandemic and post-pandemic era, Remote Working was conceptualised and implemented first by IBM in 1978 on an experimental basis. With an increase in SMEs and start-ups, preference by experts for freelancing over contractual agreements and rising focus on maintaining work-life balance by millennials and GenZ have accelerated this concept and brought it down to the mainstream industrial sector. The pandemic made it necessary for all organisations to either implement Remote Working or let their employees go, the latter of which resulted in an absolute disaster for organisations. The continuation of the pandemic led to rising health concerns among employees, and a rising trend to digitise the end-to-end working of an organisation made the remote workplace a trending topic for industrial and corporate sectors.
Different perspectives on Remote Workplace
The established norms, management theories, and business practices followed by traditional firms that focus on bringing employees to the office in different shifts are still evident. The rise of digitalisation in the VUCA world has opened new opportunities for organisations to accommodate new talent by slightly changing their established work culture. Remote Working offers the precise opportunity that helps organisations and employees optimise the time required to complete business processes as well as the expenses that comes with them. Remote workplace reduces or nullifies a major chunk of an organisation’s operational expenditure, which is owning and maintaining an asset. The reduced spending on assets enables organisations to focus on developing, implementing, and monitoring advanced technologies that will simplify various organisational processes. The implementation of latest technologies, along with savings on a major source of expenditure, helps organisations hire and retain a talented workforce without the barriers of geography, increase the remuneration of their employees, and invest in increasing their product portfolio and market reach.
Employees also benefit considerably from Remote Working. Apart from working from a place of preference, employees benefit from reduced commuting hours and the associated costs. Employees can maintain a perfect work-life balance as per their comfort and convenience, which ultimately reflects well on their performance. The flexibility offered by Remote Working enables employees to spend more time with their families and increase their focus on their health, which results in their individual development.
Challenges hampering widespread adoption of Remote Working
Though both organisations and employees benefit from Remote Working, several factors pose severe challenges to it. Some of the major challenges for implementing Remote Working on the global industrial scale are elaborated below.
Designing, developing, and implementing workload management strategies are a major issue faced by SMEs and startups that are the major beneficiaries of Remote Working. The firms' limited financial capacity and moderate to poor technological infrastructure limit these organisations from developing and implementing workload management strategies on a full scale. The lack of managerial experience by young entrepreneurs and increased focus of organisations on driving the financial cycle rather than implementing management techniques increases the organisations’ need for working from office rather than working from home.
Another vital issue is the unequal presence of essential technology required by organisations. It is easy for organisations to work smoothly where the facility of the internet is good. Good internet is essential for commencing efficient Remote Working. The presence of an inefficient distribution network and recurring glitches that result in disruption of services on a regular basis, cause severe damage to businesses and their operability. The provision of the internet to a facility is always better than to the employee base scattered across different geographical regions. Thus, avoiding disruption in work due to irregular internet provision has forced organisations to reconsider allowing their employees to continue with Remote Working.
Cognitive factors, too, cannot be ignored. A human is a social animal and works best in contact with other humans. During the pandemic, the work-from-home culture had isolated people, resulting in a range of mental health issues faced by even experienced employees. Several employees have even reported severe issues such as anxiety, mental stress, environmental monotony, mental fog, and irritational outbreak. The increasing numbers of employees complaining about severe mental issues has forced organisations to raise their doubts about the trend and are already taking steps to recall their workforce back to the office. The increasing awareness about mental health and the direct proportion of mental health on an individual’s productivity has resulted in organisations trusting the traditional approach of working rather than Remote Working.
Pointers for organisations to implement Remote Workplace and Remote Working efficiently
Remote Working has now become a norm for employees with considerable experience in their respective fields. It has been observed that in the post-pandemic era, employees favour working from home over working from the office. The new trend of mass resignation due to organisations insistence on calling their employees back to office has cemented the fact that as a trend or a preference by top management, Remote Working will stay for a long time. A few solutions that might play a crucial role in facilitating remote workplace efficiently are enlisted below.
One of the major issues employees face during work from home is the mandatory attendance for unscheduled meetings that sometimes even happen even outside of associated working hours. If organisations are planning on facilitating Remote Working for a long time, they must focus on checking the availability of all employees, their commitments, work shifts, and the difference of time zones. Organisations must focus on developing and deploying an alert system for employees to convey any changes and updates in the scheduled meeting and must focus on setting recurring calendar events to avoid any loss of communication in the organisation.
The internet connectivity issue is severe, even for employees in developed Western nations with a strong technological infrastructure. Organisations dealing with secure customer data must provide remote systems to workstations with high-powered internet to ensure the completion of allotted work and safety of sensitive organisational and end users’ data. Organisations must focus on providing advanced communication tools for smooth inter and intra organisational communication as it acts as a major tool during Remote Working.
The established parameters of working for 8 hours a day have its merits and demerits. On the one hand, it ensures maximum productivity from employees with the change in global societal cultures resulting in an increased demand for quality and efficiency of work rather than time spent in front of the workstation. Nowadays, employees are demanding their management to evaluate their performance based on the quality of their work rather than checking allotted working hours. The steep shift in the evaluation criterion by employees and management has forced organisations to implement new and untapped management theories that challenge established norms in organisations which have been in place for years.
Analysis of Current market scenario for predicting the future of Remote Workplace
Though major trend analysts are stating that Remote Working and Remote Workplaces are going to stay for a long time, we at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions hold a different approach, and in our opinion, Remote Working is going to stay in the market, but only to a limited extent. The changing trend, which at the start of this year indicated that WHF will stay forever, is now changing rapidly with most of the major firms preferring complete work from office or hybrid working for employees that perform well. Also, a range of factors, such as preference by organisations to purchase physical assets, complexities of lease agreements, and lack of trust in employees by the management act as the major factors for organisations' focus on discontinuing the remote working option. The changing demand for dynamic work culture by millennials and the GenZ population will force organisations to implement Remote Working on a large scale. Organisations, on the other hand, will implement Remote Working on a limited scale and will be restricted only to top management or exceptional cases such as injured employees and working mothers.
Nikhilesh Naik, Research Analyst, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions has a good understanding of market research tools that can benefit businesses, and can be used to maximise company profits and efficiency.
Pallavi Bothra, Research Analyst, is currently leading technology research, advisory, and user consulting initiatives at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions for the enterprise software domain.
We at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions analyse that Remote Working is going to stay in the market but only to a limited extent. Remote Working is definitely here to stay but it might be limited to certain work profiles and exceptional cases such as injured employees and working mothers.
