WORKING FROM HOME: A WORKERS REVOLUTION

Getting up in the morning and putting fancy work clothes or uniforms saw a dramatic dip induced by a world pandemic known as the Corona Virus. Let’s dive into how many around the globe were affected by their new office environments that they would also call ‘home sweet home.’ Join me in discussing the modern day workers revolution.

Many companies were forced to close its office doors to their employees and insist they work from the comfort of their own home. The idea we all had was the pandemic would pass and things would go back to normal, right? Kind of. Since many companies have implemented work-from-home measures, the relaxing of covid -19 restrictions have been seen through out many countries to date. Ideally this would mean that the work force can return to their beloved desk and chair as we did before the end of 2019. Although restrictions have been relaxed, many employers opted that their employees stay home… and the employees were okay with this.

A major contributing factor to this is that workplace related stressors are now taken out of the equation. All of a sudden our time is a lot more flexible. The inconvenience of morning traffic or commuting to and from work is no longer an issue. Nobody really sees us, so we don’t have to dolly up any more. There’s none of those daft inter-colleague conflicts. Our identities are not protected by face masks, and vaccinated or not, your employer doesn’t really care as long as your not in their office space.

In fact going forward, remote-based work has become so popular that we are seeing even larger companies encourage their work force to stay home. Also interesting, we are witnessing more professionals staying home. The numbers of these cases is increasing at a rapid rate and it is expected that we will see a huge percentage of America’s professional work force working from home by the end of 2022. That’s just around the corner. This type of work is made even easier with video meeting platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or even a WhatsApp video call. Insist that the employee take some sort of remote-work training, a weekly check-in, with some luck the employees have good communication skills, a good HR department and all of a sudden you have a strong case to justify working from home going forward. Many employees went as far as saying that they were more productive working from home than in the office too.

As employers, allowing potential employees a substantial time to work from home can go a long way in negotiating work contracts with competitive salaries or wages. Generally speaking, it’s no secret that the next generation of workers are adapting a more liberal and relaxed code of work. Gone on the days where a suit and tie was a requirement or visible tattoos disqualified you from a potential position in the public eye. In the direction that the world is heading, I personally feel that the youth will be bartering for more relaxed office hours in substitution for home working hours — irrespective of covid or not. I can just see Covid-19 having a catalyst effect on this move.

So it’s all good working from home. But, what does this mean from an employers perspective? It has made us aware that a working force is capable of getting the job done from home and that employees can actually do with more flexibility going forward. How many times have we tried prioritising ourselves only to be making way for work? Think about the sacrifices we’ve had to make for an important work shift. Consider the adjustments mothers make to ensure a child is taken care of while they’re in the office. The flexibility credited with working remotely is a major eye opener that we don’t have to put our lives on hold as much as we think. With resigning numbers on the rise due to people becoming aware of this, all of a sudden we have a demand for these vacancies to be filled. We refer to the word ‘power.’ Job candidates have more power when it comes to negotiating work contracts with the aim of more flexibility.

We will see geographic growth in more remote places with the decrease of population numbers in bigger cities. Without the necessity of living close to the office, I believe that society will lose the attraction of living in close proximity to work. 15 minutes to the office’ is a pretty irrelevant consideration when you could actually be 15 steps from your little den of productivity. The need for paying ridiculous rental prices for shoe box apartments would ideally subside without the need of people being close to where the money is.

The bar’s been raised for workers flexibility and working-from-home privileges. If you could negotiate remote work privileges with your boss, how would you go about it? Is the new unexpected way of working our new normal? Let’s hear your input!