Remote working became an instant necessity as the country hurriedly shut down in 2020. Employees of all types and across all industries quickly learned what it was like to work from home – and a lot of them learned that they loved the arrangement. In fact, when companies began to transition back to working in their centralized offices, they received a lot of unexpected pushback from employees who had decided that they liked the work/life balance that the remote structure had afforded them.
We now see a great number of companies offering remote and hybrid work arrangements as a matter of course, especially as they need to recruit and compete. Given this new paradigm and reality, we thought we would take a look at some of the most interesting facts associated with the new working-from-home trend.
- 30% of all employees in the United States now work for companies that are exclusively remote – meaning that everyone works from home or a remote location. But an even more impressive 43% of respondents worked for a company that allows working from home as a choice – meaning that nearly 3/4 of the businesses in the country offer remote working opportunities.
- 80% of the remote workforce don’t show any signs of regretting the move, citing that they would recommend working from home to friends and family.
- 50% of those who now work from home full-time have only been working from home since 2020. This indicates how rapidly the work landscape has changed due to the seismic shift caused by the pandemic.
- Flexible scheduling is seen as the biggest benefit for those working from home, as 53% love the perk. Cost savings, the lack of a commute, the ability to care for sick family members, and reduced stress were each reported by approximately 32-35% of respondents.
- Businesses are going all-in, with 67% of businesses increasing their investment in web conferencing capabilities. These platforms are working to provide more advanced features to facilitate workflows over the long-term. Microsoft Teams, the platform that eclipsed market leader Zoom, has grown from 13 million monthly users pre-pandemic to a soaring 270 million monthly users today. Similarly, companies are investing in collaboration tools (57%) and remote desktop hardware (52%), not to mention security and time-tracking applications.
- Companies looking for productivity software tools looked primarily to Google and Microsoft, which dominate the world market. Microsoft Office 365 has 54% of the vertical market, with Google apps coming in at nearly 42%.
- Cloud-based conferencing continues to explode, with the market representing $2.7 billion in 2018 and $4.1 billion in 2020 – but expected to rise to $4.8 billion by the end of 2023.
- In 2020, the IBM Institute for Business Value reported that 6 in 10 CEOs believed that empowering their workforce to work remotely was an important business objective.
Perhaps the most surprising outcome of the work-from-home experiment was how enthusiastically companies embraced the model. While prior to the crisis, many companies were averse to the idea of a distributed workforce based out of their homes, a full 83% of companies now think the model is “successful.” This is higher than the employees’ response to the same question, citing a 71% approval. This is understandable, as companies saw productivity and morale improve as overhead costs decreased – but some employees struggle to find the strength to ever really “turn off” the job when they are home.
Alliance IT has been on the front lines of this revolution, helping Sarasota businesses to adapt and grow – whether through the adoption of cloud technology, the installation of collaboration and productivity tools, or the assumption of their IT responsibilities. If you are an area business looking for ways to cut costs while maximizing the benefits of the remote environment, call us today.
