Over the past two years, our world has undergone a monumental transformation caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic. The virus has drastically changed everything from the way we spend our free time to the way we work.
In one of our previous blogs, we shared Misha Peleg’s thoughts on how the pandemic affected the corporate environment. Today, we wanted to explore this subject a bit further.
Millions of office workers have been working from home for the past two years. Misha Peleg thinks that this trend will continue well after the current pandemic. The global lockdowns initially forced millions of people around the world to switch to remote work. This has had an unintentional and surprising effect. Business executives realized that companies and organisations can successfully operate within a remote work environment.
Fears of reduced productivity disappeared when it turned out that employees can be just as productive while working from the comfort of their own homes. As a result, many companies have made the switch to 100 percent remote work environment. This also allowed them to cut costs on expensive office space. For example, Barclays Bank quit its London headquarters, allowing its staff to continue working from home.
“The notion of putting 7,000 people in a building may be a thing of the past,” said Barclays Bank CEO Jess Staley.
Another bank UBS said that a third of its staff may be permitted to work from home permanently. Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have also allowed many of their office workers work remote for much of the past two years.
Job satisfaction has also increased. 80 percent of UK office workers say that they would like to continue working from home even after the pandemic is over. Governments in the UK, Germany, and the United States are now considering legislation allowing office staff the legal right to work from home.
The work-from-home concept is not new, however. The technology needed for remote work has existed before the pandemic. In fact, home working and flexible working has been a growing trend for over two decades. But the pandemic acted as a trigger that has accelerated this trend. It ushered the age of remote work decades earlier than it would have happened otherwise. In 2019, only two percent of office workers worked from home regularly.
The pandemic has also spurred additional development in the sphere of telecommunications. Tools like Zoom, Slack, FaceTime, and Microsoft Teams has made communicating with your colleagues and manage complex projects easier than ever.
However, all this is not to say that working from office will become a thing of the past. According to Misha Peleg, the office still has an important role to play in today’s corporate environment. Teams still need to meet in person occasionally. Staff can use the office for weekly project sessions where they can share and discuss ideas with each other and argue their points in face-to-face conversations. Such socialization is important for team bonding and fostering corporate culture. As the founder of several highly successful companies, Misha Peleg can attest to the fact that motivating, encouraging, and inspiring your team is much more effective in person than in a Zoom meeting.
Some employees may actually prefer the group office environment to the isolated feeling they may experience when working from home. Certain types of professions also benefit from working in an office environment. For example, creatives benefit from working in groups where they can bounce ideas off each other and receive immediate feedback. A dedicated office space with proper information security infrastructure is best for jobs that require increased data security.
With all this said, however, there are still millions of jobs that people can do just as well from home. Peleg projects that even if just 20-30 percent of office workers continue to work remote after the pandemic is over, it can have enormous the economic and environmental effects on our society. First, this can significantly reduce issues with traffic jams in densely populated cities. Second, fewer daily commuters will also have a positive effect on air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change. Finally, the time remote workers will save by not having to travel to work every day will allow them to improve their work-life balance. This, in turn, can increase both their job satisfaction and productivity.
Misha Peleg predicts that within five years, as much as 50 percent of office workers may switch to working from home at least for part of the work week. And who knows, maybe that can even improve the current housing market by freeing some highly desirable real estate in city centers for residential use…
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