‘Business as unusual’: How COVID-19 could change the future of work

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Working from the office could become a relic of the past in the post-COVID-19 world.

Millions of people around the world have been working remotely due to the coronavirus pandemic and now experts are asking whether this “business as unusual” could be the future of work, at least for those people whose job doesn’t require them to be tied to a particular location.

UN News spoke to Susan Hayter, a Senior Technical Adviser on the Future of Work at the Geneva-based International Labour Organization, about how COVID-19 could change our working lives.

A few large companies have said employees need not commute to work again Susan Hayter, Senior Technical Adviser on the Future of Work, ILO

What are the longer-term effects of the pandemic on the workplace in developed countries, once the immediate crisis is over?

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As coronavirus forces millions to work remotely, the US economy may have reached a ‘tipping point’ in favor of working from home

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Companies are enabling remote work to keep business running while helping employees follow social distancing guidelines.

A typical company saves about $11,000 per half-time telecommuter per year, according to Global Workplace Analytics.

As companies adapt to their remote work structures, the coronavirus pandemic is having a lasting impact on how work is conducted.

With the U.S. government declaring a state of emergency due to the coronavirus, companies are enabling work-from-home structures to keep business running and help employees follow social distancing guidelines. However, working remotely has been on the rise for a while.

“The coronavirus is going to be a tipping point. We plodded along at about 10% growth a year for the last 10 years, but I foresee that this is going to really accelerate the trend,” Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, told CNBC.

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The average worker spends 51 percent of each workday on these 3 unnecessary tasks

 

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Fortunately, there are several ways to minimize these tasks or eliminate them from your company.

There are thousands of books on time management, and thousands more on work/life balance, but almost all of them either nibble around the edge of the problems or pretend they don’t exist. So, here’s the straight skinny: The reason most people are stressed for time is that they are wasting more than half of each working day on time-wasting tasks.

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The fastest growing commute is no commute at all

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A growing number of commuters have found that the fastest way to between Point A and Point B is if Point A is Point B.

More than 1 in 20 Americans now usually work from home, new 2018 data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows. Telework has recently overtaken public transit as the third-most-popular commuting method in the country.

It remains nowhere near the most popular American commute, however. Three in 4 workers, or more than 111 million people, still drive alone to the office or factory each day.

Carpooling comes in second, well above working from home. The share of Americans who carpool has lost ground since the Great Recession, though it remains far more popular than other methods, such as walking, biking or taking a cab.

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How 5G will reinvent “working from home”

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It’s 10:00 am. Do you know where your employee is? No doubt they are working—somewhere.

Thanks to greatly improved internet connectivity and workforce applications, employees in an increasing number of professions can work just about anywhere they want—in their home, at a coffee shop, on a plane. And chances are they’re more productive and more engaged than they would be if they were in the office. They may even be planning to stay in their job longer because of their flexible work location. In 2017, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, in a TED Talk, went so far as to call work-from-home potentially as innovative as the driverless car.

Now, work-from-home is itself about to be disrupted, by the coming of 5G and its ability to enable virtual reality (VR) anywhere through what’s known as XR, the combination of extended, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. Fifth-generation (5G) communications networks, with their exponentially faster connection speeds, capacity, and communication response times (known as latency), will make possible an astonishing range of innovative new products and services.

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Remote jobs are exploding and salaries can top $100,000

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The lure of remote work is obvious. You can save on the costs of a formal work wardrobe, lunches out and commuting.

Until now, you might have been limited in your choice of jobs. That’s changing. Some fields had an increase of more than 50% in remote jobs in the past year, according to FlexJobs.

More than 4 million employees — slightly more than 3% of the U.S. workforce — work from home at least half the time, according to Global Workplace Analytics, a telecommuting research site.

Certain careers offer more remote jobs than others. FlexJobs found that seven fields had high rates — more than 50% — of remote career opportunities over the last year.

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Was the telecommuting craze a failed experiment?

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Remember the time Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting at Yahoo and started a media firestorm? Some thought she’d flipped her lid. Others said she’d made a grave mistake that would kill morale. Well, she hadn’t and it didn’t. That was one of the few things she did right in her ill-fated attempt to turn around the hapless internet portal.

While the former Googler didn’t intend to start a trend, she did. HP followed suit a few months later. Then came Best Buy, Bank of America, Aetna and others.

Last week, IBM gave thousands of virtual workers an ultimatum: either show up in the office, or go work somewhere else. Considering that Big Blue pioneered the “anytime, anywhere workforce” decades ago, that sort of closes the books on what has turned out to be yet another overhyped management fad.

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Top 6 best websites for finding remote work for web professionals

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Remote work for web professionals is a viable career option.

The choice to work from home or any place where there’s an Internet connection is a viable career option for web professionals. If you’re looking to make the leap into telecommuting, a great place to start would be the following top-notch job boards that allow you to discover remote Web development work opportunities.

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