How technology is shaping the future of how we work.

Remote working in the traditional ‘non-nomadic’ worker scenario has up until recently carried a bit of a bad reputation. Employers often believed that their workforce would be too easily distracted at home, where their managers couldn't keep an ‘eye’ on individual team members.

Working from home was relatively rare a decade ago and usually only available to certain employees as a special arrangement to accommodate families in specific situations. Today however, telecomuting and teleworking technology provide the tools for businesses to not only survive but to thrive.

Certainly, in this age of Covid-19, it's become common place for employees to work from home across a multitude of service sectors utilizing, Zoom, Skype, Whatsapp, Viber and other apps that enable remote team working.‍

Is remote working better than going to the office?

The question of the lips of every employer concerns the the effectiveness of remote work, Airtasker surveyed 1,004 full-time employees – 505 of whom were remote employees – throughout the U.S. about their work habits and productivity. The results indicate that remote workers are actually more productive than their office-based counterparts. The study found the following:

• Remote employees work an additional 1.4 more days per month than in-office employees, which is nearly 17 additional workdays a year.
• Remote employees take longer breaks on average than office employees (22 minutes versus 18 minutes, respectively), but they work an additional 10 minutes a day.
• Office workers are unproductive for an average 37 minutes a day, not including lunch or breaks, whereas remote employees are unproductive for only 27 minutes.
• 15% of remote workers said their boss distracted them from work, which is less than the 22% of office-based employees who said the same thing.

I would be interested to see the same type of survey rolled out in other countries to gain comparative results. One thing that is for certain is that irrespective of the survey, remote working saved companies from going bust and employees losing from their jobs.

Deutsche Bank announced earlier this week that they are looking at continuing the work from home setup by allowing employees to work up to three days a week from home, with a host of companies globally looking to not only continue but, promote a work from home initiative.

The daily commute is slowly becoming a walk from one room in the house/apartment to another as opposed to a 2-hour stress filled journey to the office. Outside of the obvious benefits of not losing up to 4 hours per day on travelling to work, the quality of life for gaining that time back is a huge positive.

In financial services we are also seeing investors becoming more accustomed to using technology to meet with their advisors whereas before only a face-to-face meeting and handshake would do. Technology enables us to work with a borderless approach giving us access to the entire world, how have you adapted to this new way of working?