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The health risks of the coronavirus pandemic have many employers and employees focusing on remote work. While this may be novel in the short term, the limitations of this working style can cause serious challenges for employees, employers and customers. The structure of a business and their production methods will need to be extremely stable to make remote work function well in the long term.
Communication Challenges
Few businesses can fully implement a rigid production and delivery schedule that will serve all clients. For example, whether you’re producing a marketing presentation or a business valuation, your clients will likely want and need something specific in either the delivery or the presentation. Thus, while your internal processes may be fairly straightforward, the work product might be very different from client to client.
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If your team leaders are not great communicators, or if you don’t have a process structure in place for sharing this client expectation to all employees, from the author to the support staff to technical support, the work product and final presentation may not be what you expect. Americans have high expectations for the dollars they expend on product. When setting up your teams and creating your product delivery structure, leaders must make sure that everyone in the hierarchy is aware of how the work product has to go out.
Office as Hub
While American businesses of any size will likely need to keep some sort of central office location, it is likely that many of the employees who have gone remote will stay remote. Thus, while the office won’t completely disappear, the office market may contract. If your accounting firm has 50 employees, you may only need desks for 20, and some of them may need to service more than one employee.
To protect the health of all employees from the risk of COVID-19, firms should consider changing up their cleaning protocols. Instead of having a single janitorial service to clean the whole building, some multi-tenant buildings may choose to hire a private cleaning service to battle coronavirus.
Employee Focused Planning
The pandemic has brought home the lesson that employees have a life outside of work. The former expectation that life needed to balance around career has been shattered by coronavirus. Uncertainties about the ability of students to return to physical school buildings in the near future has many parents, employees and business owners scrambling to keep great working talent while the employees protect their children from COVID-19.
To that extent, the office market may need to adapt even further to keep employers, employees, and the families of all involved moving forward. For example, while parents of older children may be able to leave their adolescents on their own as parents travel to the office for part of the day, those with young children and infants may be severely hamstrung by the lack of childcare access.
An employer with the foresight to implement a private cleaning service to offer the ultimate protection against the virus may actually be able to build employee loyalty with the addition of a childcare space, or an office with a spot for a pack and play or toy bin, on-site. Americans have long forced a severe split between the traditional workspace and the families of their workers. The pandemic may force business owners to break down that wall if they want to gain full value of their space on the office market.
Conclusion
People need to gather to share ideas and do their best work. Seemingly inconsequential questions in the break-room can lead to great creativity and increased customer service. However, the standard understanding that work is only done in the office has been withering for a long time. Business will need to stay agile. Offices may shrink, but as hubs they will likely remain for years to come.
