This week, due to the coronavirus, Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter are all encouraging workers to stay home. Globally, there is a renewed emphasis on remote work. Are organizations and employees prepared to work remotely? In the age of innovation, as a topic of our future of work, we often envision remote work as an idealist scenario where you can achieve the ultimate work-life balance. Realistically, remote work is a conversation that needs to be explored in-depth, practiced over time and embraced by each individual of an organization. Just like the coronavirus, in our future of work, remote work can present an opportunity for all of us to think about what it truly means to collaborate and how it can improve our organizations.
Coronavirus introduces new challenges for businesses who aren’t used to supporting a remote workforce or even doing the majority of their work digitally. This is when having the correct IT infrastructure comes in play, a Cloud focused IT environment will facilitate businesses in providing it’s employees to work effectively and efficiently in a remote fashion.
When you dive into remote work statistics, you will find that in countries like the U.S., there’s a 159% increase in people who are working remotely from 2005 to 2017. Remote working jobs are no longer customer service jobs. They are in sectors such as Computer and IT, Medical and Health, Sales and Education as well. According to the American Psychological Association, there’s also an increase in job satisfaction while working remotely.
With such a strong argument for remote working, why are we not seeing more people working remotely?
In our future workplace, more computer programming, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and engineering jobs means that we should anticipate more technology workers to want to work remotely. But, currently, most remote workers have mixed feelings about remote working. Companies also found mixed results in their experimentation of creating teams with more remote working team members.
Are Tools and Software The Key to Remote Work? Do you need great Technology Support in Salinas?
Companies are increasingly in the position to offer tools to make remote working possible. The Google suite of tools, Microsoft suite of tools, Slack, Zoom and Skype are all putting the remote work option in reach for most businesses, even small and medium-sized businesses.
“For millennials, they value salary, flexibility of work schedule and then location. There’s a dog fight for talent amongst employers. Already, employers are finding themselves offering that as a benefit, that flexibility of remote work, set your own work hours and location. Things are already moving in that direction. On top of that, we are in a renaissance of tools that make people effective at working remotely. The necessity of physical proximity has been greatly reduced.”Ian Siegel, CEO and Cofounder, ZipRecruiter.
But, not all software and tools are created equal in this universe of remote working tools. Often, even with the proliferation of software in employee’s desktops, many employees still report disconnection and burnout. Companies are taking a second look at the way that they implement these tools, how they are used and fine-tune the tools for more effectiveness.
Companies that have successfully transitioned a bulk of their employees to the remote work option generally asked these questions: Are we offering the right tools? How can we do better? Maybe there’s a bigger issue that we are not addressing.
Business Workflows and Remote Work
In the last 20 years, due to the explosion of information, many industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, finance, etc.. are left with complex business workflows that manage information. These workflows allowed businesses to enforce standards, transparency, regulation and optimize for efficiency. But, at the employee level, most employees relied on means of communication that are often suboptimal and inefficient.
Building an Innovative Organization Can Include Remote Work
In our age of innovation, most organizations realize the need to innovate. According to entrepreneur coach Theodore Henderson, innovation is often crucial in being able to stay competitive long term in the marketplace. Innovation doesn’t just mean technology innovation. It can be company culture innovation, process innovation, management innovation, data innovation and much more.
Companies who have not embraced remote work often have a fear that the innovative organization that they built can not be sustained from having a sizable amount of their workforce working at a remote location. The truth is that building an innovative organization from top-down is a dynamic process.
It often involves people at all levels of the company. But, the fundamental narrative across the board with innovative organizations is the culture. The company culture has to include employees who feel connected to the organization and want to contribute value. In a Gallup research study, job flexibility engages remote workers and drives performance. These employees can become innovative employees. When you build an innovative organization with employees who are empowered by innovative employees, then the organization starts to look like a true innovative organization.
Adaptive Information Systems was founded with the mission to help businesses get the most out of their technology investments. We constantly push the envelope to provide our clients with the latest innovative technology that allows them to be provide their work force with remote working capabilities. We provide technology support in Salinas and the surrounding areas, we are ready to manage your IT needs so you can focus on running your business.
831-644-0300