‘This past year, everything changed in the world of remote work.’
The opening sentence of the Buffer 2021 State of Remote Work report reflects the changes the pandemic have forced upon the world of remote working. A follow up of the State Of Remote Work 2020 Report, this year’s report also places significant focus on the benefits and struggles of working remotely and investigates whether or not it is a preferred option. However, research for the latest report sought new insight into how experiences differ from those working remotely before the pandemic versus those forced into the situation.
45% of respondents now work remotely due to COVID-19. But, surprisingly, despite nearly half of the respondents being ‘pushed’ into working from home in 2020, the first two questions of the survey garnered almost the same findings as previous years when this wasn’t the case.
97% would like to work remotely, at least some of the time, for the rest of their career
97% would recommend working remotely to others
Overall, the numbers are still overwhelmingly positive for how people see remote work. It appears the pandemic ‘jolted’ the world into seeing the benefits of working remotely.
The flexibility of remote work remains the most significant benefit, with 32% citing schedule flexibility and 25% citing location flexibility as top benefits.
Buffer’s CEO, Joel Gascoigne, is hoping that these trends don’t continue. He shared, “Burnout is a big risk to those who are just working remotely for the first time and especially to people who are now in more meetings than before. My advice to company leaders is to be aware of these trends and work to minimise burnout as much as possible by establishing processes that encourage time off of work and away from computers.” At Buffer, Joel introduced a 4-day work week in May of 2020, which started as a one-month experiment and has since become a company practice that is unlikely to change soon.
The challenge of ‘not being able to unplug’ has pushed the traditional difficulties associated with collaboration/communication and loneliness each down a position.
The 2020 State of Remote Work report, recently published by Buffer and AngelList in March 2020, along with concurring reports from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times suggest that remote work options are indeed becoming the new normal.
According to the State of Remote Work report, the top two benefits for working remotely relate to greater flexibility of where and when work can be done and better work-life balance. Of the 3500 respondents:
When sharing conversations and project planning in public forums such as Microsoft Teams, team members feel included, removing the feeling of being out of the loop. In addition, offering multiple communication methods such as chat, video conferencing, and screen sharing facilities allows situation-specific communications that mimick normal office behaviours. There’s also a significant layer of apps that add the spice required for building strong culture across on-premise and remote workforces. For example:
Science agrees: People are happier and more productive when they get recognition for their efforts. So send acclaim to your employees and coworkers with Praise. Deliver in a chat, or for broader recognition, send it in a channel conversation.
Revel in the good vibes. Users will be able to recognise their colleague’s contributions by sending various badges their way. ‘Leadership’, Team Player’ and ‘Problem Solver’ are just a few options. Check out how this feature works in this video created by the Microsoft Education team. Although this example focuses on usage within the classroom, the benefits of eliminating the feelings of loneliness or being isolated when working remotely are transferable.
The Celebrations app makes it easier to remember special days such as work anniversaries, birthdays, and other repeating events. You can make a team member feel special on their day by sending a friendly message through the app which can be selected at the time of the event creation.
The app provides an easy interface for all team members to personally add and view their events and allows the user to select the teams in which the events get shared.
The Company Communicator app lets you send customized messages to employees through the chat platform where team members can collaborate. You can use this messaging template for multiple scenarios such as employee onboarding, new initiative announcements, organisation-wide broadcasts and modern learning and development updates.
Company Communicator provides an easy-to-use interface for employees to create, preview, message with each other and collaborate.
The app sets a foundation to develop custom targeted communication abilities such as custom telemetry where you can see how many users interacted with or acknowledged a message.
There’s so much more to Teams! Learn how to create, collaborate and maintain a healthy company culture with NSP’s collection of practical and comprehensive guides and free demos.