The Shift Change of Working From Home throughout the Years Especially Due to COVID-19

Abstract
The worldwide employment landscape has changed tremendously, with many people choosing to work remotely. Remote work is the practice of employees doing their job from a location other than a central office. Some areas include an employee’s home, office space, and another place outside of the corporate office. It is unlikely to slow down as companies and employees are beginning to see its benefits. The advancement in technology has made creating online tools easier and successful for employees. Initially, many employers do not embrace the idea of working from home as a viable option. However, the pandemic has triggered shifts in how individuals work, causing many companies to transition into more flexible ways of working. Currently, working from home is slowly becoming the way forward for some businesses that have experienced improved productivity due to the arrangement. Using a quantitative method, this research will collect data from public sources. The aim will be to understand the shift change of working from home throughout the years, and more so due to the current post-world of COVID-19. The research findings will be critical in assisting businesses to determine the viability of remote working.
INTRODUCTION
The global health crisis in 2020 because of COVID-19 adversely affected businesses in all industries. While some businesses have shown resilience, most of them have found ways of operating in “new normal” environments. The negative effects of the pandemic have been reported on all spheres of life, with the strongest impact on human health. Countries worldwide took drastic measures to slow down the pandemic, with most nations suspending some business activities and embracing social distancing to minimize human-to-human transmission of the virus. Such measures have resulted in lockdowns, reductions in consumption, and the elimination of business activities. With such disruptions, businesses have found themselves at the center of the challenge, with the danger of imminent closure. The pandemic has forced businesses to rethink their strategy to avoid becoming irrelevant. Organizations have gone ahead and implemented changes that allow workers to operate remotely. While teleworking is not a new idea, it has become popular, especially for most technology professionals. The onset of the pandemic forced businesses to allow workers to operate from home. The measure aimed to reduce human-to-human interactions in the offices and reduce transmission rates.
However, the global community has made numerous steps towards combating the pandemic. The introduction of vaccines has provided an effective way of reducing the spread of the virus. Vaccines have been critical in ensuring that more people are immune to the virus. If vaccinated individuals contact COVID-19, the effects are more likely to be mild. Due to the ongoing vaccination, more companies plan to bring more workers to the office. Navigating the pandemic and its aftermath is a major challenge for organizations. Given that most companies left their offices, they must establish ways of returning to their former approaches. Business is now surging back, and management teams must lead their organizations through fast-changing changes. As companies think about return-to-work plans, they are conflicted among three major alternatives. The first one is to call everyone back to the office. The approach would return to the former way of operations where all the workers would operate from the office. Secondly, organizations can offer fully remote opportunities. Here, staff members can continue working from home to provide the necessary support and infrastructure. The last method is choosing a hybrid model that combines both remote working and operating from the office. Here, employees can choose whether to work from home or come to the office.
Initially, it was challenging for most businesses to think that their staff members could operate remotely. Working from the office was overemphasized, where the management would require employees to report to the office every morning. Even for the organizations where employees could work remotely, most businesses did not consider this option viable. With the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses realized that staff members could operate remotely. The pandemic has brought businesses to realize that they need to be flexible in operating. While most of the restrictions have been listed, some businesses are not sure whether to call all their employees to the office or allow them to continue operating remotely. The pandemic has triggered the change that organizations have been reluctant to embrace for a long time. Because of the flexibility working from home provides to businesses and employees, there is a possibility that in the future, businesses will operate without offices since employees will operate from home.
RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
1. Examining the viability of businesses operating without offices
2. Determining the possibility of all workers working remotely in the future
3. Establishing what organizations would require to transition to telework
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The following are the research questions
1. Is working from home viable for all workers and organizations?
2. What are some things workers and companies need to continue working from home?
3. Should organizations embrace a hybrid model instead of working remotely or operating from the office?
LITERATURE REVIEW
Although the idea of teleworking is nothing new, it has received much attention because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the 1980s, there have been predictions that many workers will operate in their electronic cottage. However, there has been resistance from managers and employer organizations (Baker et al. 1). Attempts to change the negative perception towards operating from home have been challenging. Managerial concerns about losing control over their staff members have resulted in resistance towards teleworking (Lindén and Oljemark 9). Organizations want to have control over their staff members. They manage to effectively do so by having all the staff members report to the office when required. Measures to check when employees report, what they do during working hours, and when they leave the organization have been implemented to maintain control over the workforce. However, because a majority of the organizations did not understand how to implement the same on remote workers, they resisted the whole idea of teleworking.
According to Belzunegui-Eraso and Erro-Garcés (3), technology is crucial when considering working from home. Technological infrastructure is needed when teleworking. There is a positive relationship between technologies and working outside office buildings. Most of the time, employees operate from the office because of the availability of technological infrastructure. Companies tend to invest more in key facilities located at the office buildings. Staff members are forced to come to the office to access the facilities. Some employees may carry work home at other times, but they are forced to report back to the office to upload it on the organization’s servers. Hence, the availability of appropriate technology is essential in facilitating employees to operate from their homes. Organizations must ensure that workers have access to the required infrastructure so that they can operate smoothly. In the absence of the required equipment and software capabilities, remote working becomes ineffectively and burdensome to an entity.
Allowing employees to work from home has proved to be advantageous to organizations. Teleworking demonstrates increased productivity, less absenteeism, and getting a wider pool of talents (Lindén and Oljemark 11). Managers have to develop more trust with their workers. Here, the management must accept working with autonomous staff members who do not need constant supervision like normal office work. With employees becoming more productive when working from home, organizations benefit from increased productivity. Workers are the most important resource any organization possesses. The failure to maximize on workers means an organization cannot attain its goals and objectives. Teleworking has improved employees’ work environment, which minimizes turnover rates (Gajendran et al. 1528). The low turnover implies that businesses can maintain a pool of top talent and pass it over to new workers. At the same time, organizations spend fewer resources on training new employees. Retaining top talent is critical in ensuring that an organization maintains its competitive advantage. According to Aslam et al. (88), the business world is very competitive, and human resource management is the sole factor that allows a business to maintain its competitive advantage.
Telework presents some challenges that organizations should address. Working from home leads to social and professional isolation (Sahai et al. 2745). Workers are unable to hold regular physical meetings. Technology comes in between staff members, which limits how individuals interact. In a physical office, employees can bump into each other and exchange ideas. During normal interactions, workers share valuable information, which could benefit the company. In an attempt to increase office interactions, organizations embraced an open office plan (Muzaffar et al. 50). Here, individuals would work in the open where colleagues can access them for any assistance. The constant interaction was critical in ensuring the flow of information in the organization. With teleworking, such interactions are not possible (Toscano and Zappalà 2). Workers have to rely on technology to hold conversations, limiting their ability to share ideas. The isolation that teleworking brings can hinder collaboration among staff members. Additionally, there is a possibility of a loss of organizational culture. Businesses have established structures, which allow new workers to fit in and continue with the organization’s legacy. Working from home breaks such an arrangement and leaves every worker to do what they consider appropriate. Organizational culture is lost, which may cause an organization to lose direction (Spicer 1738). Another concern about working from home is that the arrangement results in longer working hours. Employees may find themselves working during lunch breaks and the night to meet strict deadlines. They are forced to put in more hours to meet the excessive workload, adversely affecting personal life.
COVID-19 pandemic has led to a change in perceptions regarding teleworking. Despite the opposition that managers and employers had towards the arrangement, the pandemic forced businesses to rethink the flexibility of the workplace (Kniffin et al. 6). Measures to control the spread of the virus-like social distancing and lockdowns proved that employees could continue working remotely. A majority of the organizations had invested heavily in office furnishing and equipment to facilitate a smooth work environment in the office. Despite the investment, most organizations could not have employees in the offices. The pandemic forced employers to rethink ensuring that their staff members are productive remotely. Some organizations were forced to employ measures to facilitate the new arrangement. Purchasing new equipment and software was the necessity to adapt to the change. In the aftermath of the pandemic, some organizations are unsure whether to continue with the remote working arrangement, recall their staff members to the office, or have a hybrid approach (World Economic Forum 18).
This research adds to a body of research investigating the impact of working remotely. Much focus has been on how the COVID-19 has adversely affected businesses and workers. More studies have highlighted how businesses can navigate through the aftermath of the pandemic and recover from the massive losses experienced. To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, less research has been published on if working from home is the way forward for the business. More research on how businesses can ensure a smooth transition from home to the office is necessary. Other researchers have focused on the pros and cons of working remotely. There is a gap of knowledge on whether businesses can rethink abandoning offices and shift their attention to teleworking.
The findings of this research would allow organizations to evaluate their readiness to embrace remote working. The data generated would also be critical to other researchers who wish to undertake further study on the topic. The analysis and results would form a basis for investigating the topic. Further, there is limited research on remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given that the pandemic hit the world starting in 2020, there is still limited research on this area. A majority of the studies focused more on the impact of the pandemic on businesses. This research aims to examine the idea that businesses can operate in the future without offices by allowing all their workers to operate remotely. Further, the study determines what organizations and workers would need to ensure that such a transition would be possible. The research would also establish...