Home offices are the new norm

Work from home or home offices has become more of a permanent feature for many employees. It has highlighted the importance of physical proximity as a factor shaping the future of work.

The organizations have already experienced how the pandemic has normalized remote work, and it means to them. The office work will never be the same again. However, the uncertainty and a sudden shift to distributed work have provided both employees and employers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine everything about how to do the job and how to run the companies.

Let us discuss how businesses drive engagement, achieve organisational agility, maintain alignment and empower teamwork across all the domains and locations. While companies will have a cost advantage from running remote workplaces, what’s in store for employees?

Here they are:
Work from home is an abbreviation that we all learned in 2020. The pandemic has shone a light on the way we work, revealing what many of us believed impossible. However, the wonders of modern technology taught us how we could work productively and maintain the project timelines.

Now, organizations are rethinking their physical footprints and shifting from crisis management to planning the new normal; it is clear that they have adopted the massive cultural change. According to a post-pandemic global survey by Global Workplace Analytics, 94% of workers want to work from home at least occasionally in the future also. Hence, we can expect many companies to deploy more tech in the near future.

It is challenging for many establishments to find the right balance between in-house and remote work. It is a worrying factor for them to learn to manage remote teams and facilitate effective collaboration. And, a lot of managers are anxious because they don't know how to make people productive in their remote places. But now, we need macro-managers who create clarity with meaningful goals for their teams. They have to learn to measure outcomes, not processes.

“Trust & autonomy are the two essential ingredients the drive the right outcomes.”

What happens to the office?

Managing communication is one of the hardest aspects of remote working. Trust and autonomy play an essential role with the team members when they are working from their places. Companies must discuss how often they should connect virtually during the week and specify the tools. With a favored approach with their remote teams, they should intelligently use instant communication tools to interact with them in real-time and delayed communication platforms to allow them to think and answer responsibly.

What does this mean for workspace design?

While nobody can assure how long the remote working measures will be needed, the accelerated trend looks set to change the workplace structure. Before the pandemic, the primary focus was the physical space to facilitated human interaction. However, the future for workspace design is now on bringing teams together to share knowledge and wisdom; collaboration and integrated experiences.

We're already seeing greater demand for collaborative spaces around problem-solving, innovation, and socializing. But we reckon there'll be more focus on mentoring, and when people have more flexibility about their remote workplace, businesses, including, Rubenius need to create an inspiring destination. It's not just the benefit of geographical freedom – it’s more to do with balancing wellbeing, sustainable materials, design of interaction and transforming the experience with technology that binds everything together.