How the world is re-thinking to shift to working from home permanently?

This coronavirus pandemic has forced the world to work from home as the only solution to sustain businesses and thus boosting the demand for whole bunch of technologies which facilitate to work indoors. Most of them being collaboration tools (like Microsoft teams, Slack, Google hangout chat, etc), Virtual private networks and firewalls.

According to a Gartner survey of chief financial officers, released earlier in April, 74% of companies surveyed plan to permanently shift to more remote work even after the crisis is over.

Also hearing what TCS Chief Operating Officer N Ganapathy Subramaniam said the company believes that it does not “need to have more than 25% of workforce at our facilities in order to make all the 100% productive.” Pointing out that every employee need not be present in the office all time he said, “I think it’s sufficient that they spend 25% of their time in our offices.”

These decisions were taken not only because it can drastically reduce the company’s operating costs, it would even increase the overall productive hours spent as a person working from home doesn’t need to drive to work. This would not only save employees time but also save fuel, reduce traffic on roads and pollution in air. This looks like a small step but has drastic implications.

What I believe will be the implications of this shift?

It’s no doubt that software industry has realised that not every employee needs to come to office in order to do his/her job. Working remotely initially was a challenge since this was the first time everyone had to start using collaboration tools more extensively. It’s fine, every new habit has its own teething problem. But now it has been more than a month that people have working in this fashion and now we see employees have got accustomed to this working model.

Now if this all is true that more and more companies will look onto transitioning into this working fashion, this will even change the way we build our homes. This would create a new demand from consumers to have a home office as a dedicated room in every house and apartment and interior designers would now have to carve out even these home office rooms.

Home workstation setups will gain significant popularity and consumers might start requiring much faster home broadband connections. Personally, I am really excited to shift to this form of working as other since I no need to wait in traffic and instead focus on self-improvement and learn how to become productive at home.

On the other hand, the expensive commercial office spaces would no longer be required and newer office would be constructed only to cater a limited number of their employees and this way the companies can save tremendous amount of money. No need of bigger cafeterias, air conditioning, lesser parking space, lower manpower required to run services in office.

And this would not only result in us being more productive over period of time, many might start exercising or develop some side business and grow, all at the comfort of staying at home. Many startups would start coming up which might deliver better networking at home, or give higher security. Even furniture makers would start to design more innovative desk for those who would opt to work from home. Time can say how we streamline the lessons we learn from this forced lockdown.

Do you think you can we might be going to make remote working as a norm?