By now, we have all probably heard that the coronavirus pandemic is changing the world about a million times. The truth is that it is indeed changing the way we work – Permanently. Numerous studies and trends suggest that remote working isn’t just a phase or a temporary setback during the pandemic. From the looks of things, It’s pretty much the new normal. And we have to get used to that.
Biteable's Working from Home Statistics found that 62% of remote employees say they’d be happy to work from home forever.
It’s worth mentioning that remote working has been on the rise for a while now, since the simpler times before the pandemic. More companies have been offering the option of working from home and a significant chunk of the American workforce take them up on that offer. Home-based work is getting more common as better technology is becoming more affordable and high-speed internet is getting more accessible.
Just like many other aspects of our lives, the pandemic has further catalyzed this as well. Despite the aforementioned growth in remote working, many companies were slow to adopt home-based work practices because of the sheer inertia of traditional practices. Yahoo went so far as to ban remote working entirely. People have always traveled to work and had jobs in offices, and it was hard to change that - without a huge shock to shake the world, that is. That’s the role the coronavirus pandemic played. It forced organizations to find alternative ways to function with the precautionary practices and protocols in place. To adapt to a social distancing workforce, many companies were compelled to allow their employees to work from home.
Now that organizations are forced to think about alternative ways to work, they are not only finding value in remote working practices but also questioning whether coming into offices is even necessary anymore. In fact, some companies like Twitter will allow their employees to work from home indefinitely, even after the whole pandemic threat has blown over. Facebook is also planning for a permanently home-based workforce. It should come as no surprise that the tech companies are leading the change to remote working, since technology is a driving factor in the remote working shift.
Therefore, with the momentum of traditions now broken and organizations being more open to change, the future of work seems to hold a lot of remote working in store. Companies are starting to see the benefits they can reap by working from home and, over time, remote working will create its own momentum that would be hard to stop.
Now that we’ve established that remote working is the future of work, it’s worth going over what working from home has over working from offices. Reduced costs associated with a physical office is a good place to start. With fewer people coming into the office (maybe even none at all) you will have to spend much lesser on office spaces. That's because, smaller office spaces will suffice and, by extension, fewer furniture and equipment will be needed. Similarly, the overhead on office spaces will also be considerably lesser when compared to an office space accommodating a full workforce. Some estimates say that companies spend an average of $10,000 per employee on offices. Saving that money is one of the biggest benefits of working from home.
Furthermore, you also get to enjoy a boost in employee productivity. Considering that employees will be spending less time on the road in rush hour traffic, they will give back some of that saved time to you. Some studies show that employees are better motivated at home because they don’t have to face the unpleasantness of travelling to work each day and they enjoy the flexibility that comes with remote working. Plus, when employees are not bound by public transportation or carpool routines, they won’t have to rush out of the office, and they can spend more time on the tasks they are working on. They are also less likely to be distracted by their coworkers at home than in the office, allowing for more focused attention on tasks.
Another huge benefit that employers don’t immediately realize is that remote working opens up a wider talent pool for you. When employees are not coming into an office to work, it doesn’t matter where you hire them. You can utilize the talents and abilities of people all over the world, giving you a much bigger net to cast. This way, you can harness the various abilities of various people, find cultures and values that align with the company’s and reduce costs by virtue of exchange rates. There is also a noticeable fraction of the workforce who base their decision of working in a company on the provision of remote working.
Finally, employers and employees alike can find solace in the fact that they are essentially helping fix the environmental damage by avoiding burning fuel in cars by travelling during rush hour.
When going remote with your work, you need to make sure that you’re doing it right to get the best results, and doing it right includes using videos for communication as much as you can. A significant drawback of working from home is that employees miss the face-to-face interactions, not only with their coworkers and peers but also with managers and bosses that they have built a rapport with. Videos can go a long way in bridging that communication gap and keeping your employees engaged and happy. You can eliminate that facelessness by using videos for announcements, introducing new policies or even motivational exercises.
Using enterprise video streaming platforms like VIDIZMO, companies like yours can really use videos to their advantage. You can keep the employees connected to the upper management by giving them regular updates on the company’s progress and the goals achieved through their hard work. This way, the employees feel engaged and motivated to do more to contribute to the company’s progress, regardless of where they are working from. In VIDIZMO, you can insert surveys and supplementing documents in the video to further enhance the experience while also receiving valuable feedback from the employees.
Live video streaming is great for engaging the entire remote workforce at the same time. Using VIDIZMO, your employees can interact with each other as well as the presenter of the live stream using the live chat and Q&A section. Just as in on-demand videos, you can insert quizzes and surveys in the live stream as well to test the viewers or collect feedback. VIDIZMO allows for device and network agnostic streaming, which means that your employees can continue working while watching the live stream on another device, such as their smart phones or tablets.
When you online meetings and video conferences, you can record those meetings and share them with the employees over the platform. VIDIZMO allows integration with almost all the big video conferencing tools like Zoom, BlueJeans, Teams, etc. You can automatically ingest your recorded meetings in the platform and then share them with your employees securely, using passwords, role-based access control and whatnot. In case someone misses the meeting, they can watch the recording and catch up. Employees can also use the recorded meetings for future reference. When working from home, they won’t have each other right there to tap on the shoulder and talk about the meeting. In such cases, they can go and rewatch the meeting and recall information or even catch some of the details they may have missed the first time around. With VIDIZMO’s Artificial Intelligence capabilities like transcription, facial and speech detection, employees can also skip ahead to the important parts based on what’s being said or who’s saying it.
Remote working includes hiring new employees and preparing them for work. Therefore, remote working goes hand-in-hand with remote training. Using VIDIZMO, you can deliver learning material to your employees, new and old alike, to convey information complete with supporting documents and tests. VIDIZMO gives you complete user-level analytics so you can gauge each employee’s performance and progress. You can make learning plans and courses according to departments, themes or subject matter.
To find out more about VIDIZMO’s capabilities and offerings,