Remote Companies - Doing a Pulse Check

How is remote work being adopted across industries?

Our research found that the shift to remote and hybrid work has taken hold across all industries. Whereas just a few years back, the marketing and software development industries held the largest share of remote workforces, today the embrace of remote work is relatively evenly distributed across all major industries.

What does this mean for the future?

We believe, based on research, that an increasing number of companies will explore the hybrid/remote option, spurred in large part by the workforce’s demand for level of flexibility.

Adoption of Remote Work by Company Size

According to our research, companies that had between 51 and 200 employees are the most prominent adopters of remote work (38.06%). Not far behind, companies with 50 employees or fewer are the next most likely to work remotely (32.42%). The most significant increase in the adoption of remote work since our last research in 2019 was seen in enterprise companies, where adoption grew from 2.2% to 10.64%*

In recent years, remote work has evolved from being the domain of smaller, agile teams to become a working model increasingly embraced by large enterprises. This trend plays out in our research and also in real-world examples in huge companies like Microsoft, Google and others adopting hybrid work structures.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Remote Work

When COVID-19 wreaked havoc on the planet, many companies, around 47% according to OECD, were forced to adjust on the go to enable employees to work from home. For many, the expectation was that once the pandemic was over, things would return to normal.

For many companies, COVID accelerated the move to a distributed way of working. This prompted companies to become more flexible and agile, traits that will continue to benefit organizations in our increasingly digital working world.

Remote and Hybrid are Here to Stay

Completely remote work environments are no longer required in most locations. As COVID-19 restrictions ease globally, 64.68% of our survey respondents said that they will allow their employees to permanently work in a hybrid or remote environment.

And they’re not alone.

Companies ranging from Twitter to PwC to Robinhood have stated that they will allow employees to continue working from home even after the risks of COVID-19 have passed. Many organizations welcome a change to a "hybrid" work environment in which employees split their time between coming into the office and working from home.

Remote and hybrid work are here to stay and, our research suggests, they will become the prevailing work models of the future.

Giving Employees Flexibility

In a clear sign that flexibility is a priority for modern employees, our research revealed that 71.45% of company leaders will allow remote work at least some of the time.

Research shows that flexibility is top of mind for modern employees, a mindset that became more deeply entrenched during COVID-induced work from home arrangements. In granting this flexibility, companies with workers working both in-office and remote will have to learn to adapt to a hybrid way of working.

The intention to allow employees to work from home some of the time will lead to hybrid work becoming the most popular model in the future of work. This will require employers to test various hybrid models and institute a collaborative hybrid infrastructure built on top of technology to make hybrid work successful.

The Challenges of Remote Work

Transition of any kind comes with bumps and challenges. And company leaders told us that it was no different when making the shift to remote work.

Our research indicated that 52.42% of the companies in our survey said that their transition to remote work was smooth. This can be attributed to some degree to the software tools available today. If COVID-19 had hit even just 5-10 years ago, at a time when we lack the technology we have today, we can only imagine the impact on work would have been far greater.

In a near-equal distribution, 47.58% of company leaders said their transition to remote wasn’t smooth. To dig deeper into the challenges of shifting from the office to remote, we polled asked respondents about the biggest specific challenges they faced.

For many businesses, hybrid work is the new normal. However, managing a workforce that is now operating in two distinct contexts – remote and office – has a set of specific challenges.

Difficulties with collaboration and communication were marked as the biggest challenge, with 21.38% of leaders reporting this as their biggest concern.  Tracking employee productivity and being in a different time zone followed closely with 15.92% and 18.97% respectively.

Hybrid and remote work have clear advantages, such as expanding your organization's talent pool and reducing overheads. However, there are also new issues that are emerging, especially since this is new ground for many leaders. As leaders select the best long-term direction and strategy for their teams, it’s important that they weigh the known challenges outlined here against the advantages.

A Working World in Flux

Change is an inescapable part of teams going virtual. But what has been the biggest change for company leaders?

According to our research, a resounding 27.42% of respondents said measuring productivity is the biggest change that remote or hybrid work has precipitated.

Having helped 1,300+ organizations improve their productivity, we can confidently say that how productivity is measured and managed requires a different approach in remote and hybrid environments.

For example, simply tracking how many hours an employee works is no longer a reliable measure of productivity on its own. It’s incumbent on company leaders to also quantify the quality, value, and availability of those hours.

One-size-fits-all productivity assessments are no longer effective in today's work environments. Productivity targets and results must be based on more instructive metrics than simply time inputs, including role function, impact on customer and business needs, technology usage, and more.

With Insightful, company leaders no longer have to rely on subjective assessments, intuition, or hunches. Instead, Insightful helps teams find signals in the noise of modern work to create work environments where employees thrive.

With Insightful, company leaders no longer have to rely on subjective assessments, intuition, or hunches. Instead, Insightful helps teams find signals in the noise of modern work to create work environments where employees thrive.

With Insightful, company leaders no longer have to rely on subjective assessments, intuition, or hunches. Instead, Insightful helps teams find signals in the noise of modern work to create work environments where employees thrive.

How Remote & Hybrid Teams Communicate

Schedules and calendars have trained us to function in synchrony, which occurs when two or more persons are in the same place (physically or digitally) at the same moment.

However, we now live in a world where asynchronous communication allows us to progress projects without having stakeholders to be physically or electronically present at the same time. Asynchronous communication improves the way individuals work and communicate (and when they work and communicate).

So, it came as somewhat of a surprise when our research found that 49.44% of respondents do not encourage asynchronous communication.

Asynchronous communication may not be as widely entrenched as what many, especially those in the tech industry, believe. It’s possible to read into this that many company leaders still encourage – and in fact put an emphasis on – real-time communication, even when teams are working remotely.

The Impact on Productivity of Remote & Hybrid Work

As a result of the pandemic, many employees now have the ability to work remotely. However, while remote work is taking hold across the world, 38.06% of those surveyed feel that employees are less productive in a remote or hybrid environment.

This majority viewpoint aligns with a stigma that remote work still carries with it in some circles: that people who work away from the office are less productive. Whether real or perceived, this issue needs addressing when it comes to remote work. The best way to do so is by having an accurate and objective way to measure and increase productivity.

Before going remote or hybrid, it’s vital to first establish a productivity baseline. Once this is in place, you can institute a system to measure the impact of work location on productivity, which will help you design the most effective working model for your team.

Insightful is a workforce productivity and analytics solution that enables teams to become more productive by building more efficient processes and identifying productivity trends and patterns.

Insightful is a workforce productivity and analytics solution that enables teams to become more productive by building more efficient processes and identifying productivity trends and patterns.

Insightful is a workforce productivity and analytics solution that enables teams to become more productive by building more efficient processes and identifying productivity trends and patterns.

Measuring Productivity in a Distributed Environment

Accurately measuring productivity is a complex task, even for the most sophisticated of organizations.

Our research found that 30.32% of respondents measure productivity by time spent on tasks and tasks completed. Somewhat alarmingly, 23.87% of companies say they simply estimate productivity levels, indicating a lack of a trusted way to measure productivity. The time spent on tasks plus tasks completed formula is a conventional approach that is often adopted as a standard method for quantifying productivity. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

In simple terms, putting in more time doesn’t always mean getting more done. And completing a task doesn’t guarantee quality of work. Further complicating matters, there is a greater difficulty in accurately measuring productivity when it comes to creative projects and more complex assignments involving multiple people or steps – especially when teams are split across borders and timezones.

Experience tells us that a more nuanced approach is needed to understand productivity in today's remote and hybrid work environments. To put it another way, each company's definition of productivity is going to be different, so access to deeper productivity insights are required to tell the full story of productivity in the context of your company’s goals.

Insightful' in-depth productivity insights provide you with a more informed way with actionable data insights, enabling you to:

• Invest in your people, improve workflows and create more efficient processes.
• Understand what makes your team do great work – in the office, remote or hybrid.
• Inspire productivity by providing the environment, coaching, and support your team needs to work best.

Technology Use in the Remote & Hybrid Environments

Your employees are only as effective as the resources they have at their disposal.

According to our survey, 63.91% don’t have the right tools to manage employee productivity.

What do we mean by "tools" when we talk about this? Devices, equipment, mechanisms, resources, and applications—anything that aids you in completing your task—are all examples.

There are countless resources available. Managers face the challenge of finding the right tools to help their employees. It is critical for your business to provide its employees with the tools they need to do their jobs efficiently, whether those tools are in the form of physical equipment or software applications.

Conclusion

After the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a widespread shift to remote work, many people's concept of the workplace shifted as well. The pandemic has caused a rethink and change in perception about the productivity and engagement of remote employees, resulting in greater acceptance of remote and hybrid work across the globe.

The flexibility of remote work meets the needs of many employees, resulting in improved work-life balance, employee engagement, and overall performance. The popularity of remote work is likely to continue to grow long after the pandemic has passed. It is critical to accept this reality in order to maintain a high-performing organization that is capable of continuing to grow and succeed.

When it comes to designing and maintaining a remote-friendly work model, your company's core business decisions should be based on relevant data, just like so many other areas of business are. If you base your business decisions on gut feelings and intuition, it’s highly likely your distributed work environment will be suboptimal – or fail entirely.

Data should underpin everything you do because it tells you if it's working or not. Data that reveals the impact of location on productivity lets you design the best remote or hybrid model for your team. Data about technology usage will ensure your team has the tools needed to perform. And metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) allow you to accurately assess your progress, wherever employees are located.

After arguing for the use of data in decision-making, one question remains...

How do you capture and make sense of data your business needs to thrive in the new, remote way of working?

Insightful enables teams to work in a more informed, productive way by providing actionable data insights that help improve workflows, create more efficient processes, support employee engagement, reduce burnout and much more.