Back in March, the rise of Covid-19 led many companies to extend permissions to employees to
work from home. The result? Many organizations learned firsthand the same data that multiple
studies have found about employees’ productivity and engagement from home, which points to
the evidence that people who are permitted to work remotely are often more productive, more
engaged, and more satisfied with their work than their co-workers in the office.
One fourth of the U.S. workforce works remotely (before Covid) at least some of the time,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of course, not everyone can do their job from a
home office, but with the many online tools and technologies readily available to employers, the
resistance to working from home from company leaders, especially during a pandemic, shows
how deep the bias runs for remote work as somehow less productive than working every day in
an office.
Parents and other caregivers especially suffer when it comes to little to no flexibility regarding
work-from-home arrangements with their employers. Women are more likely to have care
responsibilities, so this belief that the best work is done in the office hurts us the most.
That said, Millennials have taken the lead on job progression issues like working from home,
maintaining work/life balance, and finding meaning in their work, and working from home or
having flexibility in hours has been an attractive perk to gain top talent for many companies.
During those first few turbulent weeks of Covid-19, millennials especially found themselves in a
balancing act of caring for their families in addition to working from home full-time, managing
schoolwork and their own work from their dining room tables.
Falling into this category myself, I spoke to many parents who were thrilled to be presented with
options to work from home and spend more time with their children, but feared their
organization’s leadership would pull them back in once the threat of coronavirus lifts.
Millennials currently (as of 2020) take up at least half of the global workforce, and with the
evolving changes to office culture and the ways we work, attracting and retaining top talent will
be determined by what drives that talent. If your organization made the switch to allow
telecommuting during Covid-19, providing your team with the tech and productivity tools to
continue working from home is a positive step in the right direction of growth and innovation for
the workplace.
This article was originally featured in the July 2020 issues of Townelaker and Around Woodstock. You can read it online or pick it up at local magazine retailers.
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