In our last post, we looked at how understanding employee needs can help optimize a remote or work-from-home setting. While the pandemic has accelerated a culture of remote work, part of ensuring continued success for your team is staying current as new trends emerge.
Current Remote Work Trends
Watch for these trends in 2022 and beyond.
- Team building retreats in offsite locations to bring together remote employees.
- Mentorship between team members across departments to build new skills.
- Emphasis on a hybrid office culture that combines WFH and regular in-office time.
- Increased regional, national, and global teams made possible through advanced IT services and collaboration apps like Slack, Zoom, Zoho Cliq, Flock, and Discord.
- Flexible work days with a focus on successful outcomes.
- Higher compensation from reduced overhead and need for brick-and-mortar offices.
- A less pyramidal approach to hierarchical structures with an emphasis on teamwork.
- Productivity will be measured by creating a harmonious work/life balance.
A New Office Culture
The transformation of office culture signals a shift in the history of organized labor, but it’s not free of problems. New systems often create new solutions. A significant feature of the new office culture is an emphasis on understanding, diagnosing, and solving problems with greater speed and regularity to make everyone happy through continuous improvement.
The New Terms of Remote Work
Business + Leisure has become “Bleisure,” the act of combining business and leisure into one trip. Work and vacation have problematically been christened “workations.” “Workations,” according to Nick Pipitone at propomodo, are a troubling trend because “it’s either a vacation or not, and [a] working vacation is a bit of an oxymoron. If you’re working at all, it’s not a vacation.”
“Hot-desking” is the corporate equivalent of musical chairs for a rotating workforce that comes into the office occasionally. Hot-desking will likely be a prevalent feature of a hybrid office culture experience, one which involves the flexibility to assign specific desks or work areas to employees while at the office rather than providing each worker their own desk. The cost-benefit of a hybrid office scenario also allows for a smaller brick-and-mortar footprint as WFH employees cycle through both on-site and remote work.
The Evolving Meaning of Office Culture
A recent Gallup poll also found that “while most workers don’t think remote work will improve their office culture, they don’t think it will hurt it either.” Work is work, and the tightrope walk of work/life balance is not only an enduring trend in the workplace, it is essential for attracting and cultivating a vibrant and productive office culture, as the definition of “office” expands to mean wherever work gets done.
Understanding the evolving workspace of office culture greatly improves your ability to attract and retain top-ranking candidates. It also keeps your company agile as workplace trends evolve.
The Frontier of Remote Work
A modern workforce requires a visionary approach to previously ignored externalities of employee life. It also requires management to be actively engaged with all levels of their company and to have a robust managed IT service in place to ensure the basics of cybersecurity, network service, access points, and cloud storage are met, and that they become part of a high-functioning infrastructure that allows for seamless work, while keeping your data and your clients’ data secure.
Have Your Virtual Cake and Eat it Too
One of the strengths of remote work is being able to draw on the corporate structures that bring workers together in an expanding virtual setting, where everyone is set up for success.
Want to help your remote team be more productive? Reach out to Nettology today and schedule a consultation with one of our IT experts!
