The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has brought about a change in the way that we, as employees, complete our daily work. Beyond having to adapt to the Zoom driven world of online meetings, staff have been asked to adjust their day-to-day from their homes.
As the world continues to battle with lockdown, research agencies have been busy conducting interviews and running questionnaires to better understand this grand work experiment.
Inc-Query and QuestionPro prepared a survey that was run throughout 2020, asking within the survey how often staff would like to have paid work from home days at home. The responses were astonishing. Just 10% of respondents indicated that they would like to fully return to the office everyday. That is in stark contrast to the staggering 75% of workers that indicated that they would like at the very least at least one day at home per week, and from that 75%, 27% would prefer to work from home 5 days per week.
Of course, not all companies will eventually allow their staff to work from home on a permanent basis, but some have already began plans to enable this, such as Twitter and Facebook.
Companies such as Oracle and Microsoft already offered a very generous work from home program prior to the pandemic, and staff within these companies already had the flexibility to pick and choose from where they would prefer to work.
There are plenty of businesses that sit on the opposite side, with Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings quipping that WFH was, “a pure negative”.
With 2021 likely to continue to be a challenge with regards to an end to the pandemic, and with an enormous plan to roll out a mass-scale vaccination program across the planet, companies will continue to ask their staff to work from home, or at least return to the office for short periods of time.
In the post-COVID world, it appears employees stand to benefit as this perk becomes a persistent feature of many jobs. What is almost certain to be here now and likely in to the future, will be the ability for staff to choose how many days per week they will be able to work from home.