Making Remote Working Work
How the COVID-19 outbreak accelerated a trend—but how can companies navigate this?
It’s not often you hear incumbents that emphasize on employees physically working beside each other transition to remote work—until the coronavirus outbreak happened. When a senior employee from major advertising agency Dentsu Group Inc. was hospitalized due to COVID-19, 5,000 employees from the company were forced to work from home. Over at cosmetics maker, Shiseido, 8,000 employees were also sent home to work remotely.
Across the globe, businesses and companies have been taking up remote work as a means to keep their operations going, despite social control measures and fears of contracting the virus. It’s not just savvy tech startups in Silicon Valley anymore: public companies are also hopping on the remote work bandwagon in an attempt to prevent the virus’s spread. In Singapore, even the Ministry of Manpower suggested that employees keep their business operating with remote working.
According to an Owl Labs study in 2018, 44% of companies around the world don’t allow remote work at all—something that will eventually change as 70% of people globally work remotely at least once a week, as seen in a study by IWG. For something that was once thought of as a “revolution”, even incumbents are embracing it. Some…
