The Remote Collaboration Conundrum in a WFH Environment and 5 Action Points for Addressing it
The first step towards business continuity after the COVID-19 outbreak was to secure the workforce, ensure their safety, and move operations. We are now in the second phase, when our initial response is over and it is time to recalibrate workforce management and IT operations to business as usual. One could even argue that this is an opportunity for companies to come out as future-ready entities, safeguarding employees, and gaining from a dynamic market, with its pent-up demand.
However, one critical problem gets in the way of achieving this goal – the challenges around remote collaboration. By July,
Gartner found that 82% of business leaders planned to roll out remote work at least some of the time. For industries where remote work is possible (law, service delivery, e-commerce, accounting, knowledge work, to name a few), working from home or WFH is undeniably the new normal. But newly remote workers are lagging far behind their more experienced counterparts in terms of productivity, workplace satisfaction,and engagement finds a
Slack survey.
This is because going remote involves a massive cultural shift, upending work habits that employees have imbibed for decades. There is a yawning gap between new-age, 100% remote companies (e.g., Zapier) and large, traditional enterprises – that employers are expected to bridge in a matter of weeks, with little or no guidance.