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Your Remote Worker is Looking for Another Job Online

As much as you have sought to make all the accommodations so that your staff can work from home, even so, your remote worker is looking for another job online. The HR departments of all surviving employers are out there raising the bar, offering more perks and benefits to entice your employees to jump ship, and your people are taking notice.

And if you are thinking that your employees are looking forward to returning to the grind of showing up at your office every day to report to work, be forewarned, an overwhelming percentage of your telecommuting employees would gladly take a pay cut for the chance to continue to work from home following the lifting of pandemic restrictions. Remote work is the future.

If you subtract state, federal, and municipal telecommuters from the equation, 80 percent of teleworkers are looking for a better deal online. Your competition knows this, and they are making their intentions known, because if nothing else, the pandemic has alerted your staff that their earning potential is no longer limited by location. They can now work anywhere in the world, while never having to leave their homes.

And for those workers who were restrained to metropolitan living to accommodate their daily commutes to and from work, they are moving away from the hustle and bustle. Why? They are seeking a better life, freedom from the stress and strain of being a part of the rat race, reduction in the cost of living, and to relocate closer to the families they moved away from to seek grand employment opportunities.

This is forcing small businesses who are doing their best to adapt and survive throughout the lingering effects of the coronavirus outbreak to focus on increasing benefits to telecommuting employees to retain the current workforce.

You are going to have to reevaluate your incentives to stay competitive and increase employee retention during these unprecedented times.

Here are some ideas you can up the ante for employee retention:

1. Loosen the Reigns

If you’ve been tracking your remote workers like the Dickens, then you might start thinking about other methods of tracking your employees’ performance while they are working from home. Teleworkers are not fond of thinking they are being micromanaged or spied upon. Other firms who empower their employees to be responsible for themselves in delivering the goods are consistently seeing record-breaking results from their work-from-homers.

2. Health Benefits

Medical insurance is a highly sought perk for telecommuters. For small businesses, this might be too much of a nut to crack, so think about offering health benefits, like health club memberships, or offer to go halfsies on a treadmill they can use to stay fit at home. Be creative.

3. Workspace Assistance

If you could see the conditions that remote workers are working under to deliver the results you are looking for while they are working from home, you might be surprised that they are working in less than complimentary conditions, while perched on the sofa or curled up in bed with their laptop because they do not have an adequate home workspace. You can offer matching incentives or provide your remote workers with a basic workspace set up.

4. Employee Vacations

Many employers offer vacation time where employees earn a percentage of the hours they’ve worked back in hours to be spent while on vacations, but the growing trend is to also offer a stipend incentive to subsidize the actual cost of getting out and taking a vacation, and not just holding up inside your home, and watching TV. Statistics prove that vacationing teleworkers are the most productive and feel more content while they are on-the-clock.

5. Increased Flexibility

If you empower your employees to adjust their hours to their own schedules, they feel a higher degree of affinity with their employers. If you want to keep them, let them make their own schedules and allow them to even undercut their hours and sacrifice a few unpaid hours to tend to personal details. You gain long-term reliability and increased job performance. So, lighten up.

It looks like your staff’s preference is to continue to work from home even after the pandemic restrictions are lifted, so it behooves you to pay attention to this emerging trend of our new normal and start to make accommodations for employee retention.

 

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‘Tis the Season to Find Jobs Online

No doubt, if you are used to finding a seasonal part-time or full-time temporary job during the winter months or for the holidays, things are extremely different this year thanks to the pandemic.

Nonetheless, ‘tis the season to find jobs online, whether they be temporary or more permanent jobs. You can use the holiday season to get your foot in the door in a telecommuting job, work from home, and be first in line for a full-time job when it becomes available. Not unlike jobs when small businesses had a chance to survive in the brick and mortar venue(s), the streets were open, and we were not on lockdown.

Last year, you could have found seasonal jobs on the streets, by responding to Help Wanted signs in the windows of your favorite establishments. Local shops and retail stores littered the streets, and in a day (or two) you could end up exchanging your skills for cash in a brick and mortar business or restaurant.

This year, we have seen the biggest downturn in small businesses ever, and those left standing (only about 30 percent) could still use a helping hand during the holidays. Other businesses and organizations who were unaffected by the pandemic were able to quickly adapt to the telecommuting-style of working from home, and they, too, are looking for extra help during the holidays.

Though this year, you won’t find the Help Wanted signs hung in the windows. Now, you will have to find these jobs online, and not all of the jobs are teleworking as many warehouses and other essential businesses are in need of the extra labor to help make it through the holidays.

And if you thought your job search could be done by scouring your newspaper’s classified’s Help Wanted section, at first glance, you will know this is not how it is done. You will have to take your job search online.

If you want to find a job this year, you will have the best luck looking at sites like, jobs.google.com, Flexjobs, Indeed.com, upwork.com, facebook.com/jobs, and CraigsList, just to name a few. And what kind of jobs will you find?

As you might have guessed, right now there is a preponderance of jobs online which are primarily remote work, such as data entry, social media, internet marketing, customer service, telemarketing, and spoken language interpreters. You will also find retail, delivery, and warehouse jobs. And many of them include perks and benefits, including health insurance and paid vacations.

If you have a car and a valid driver’s license, delivery jobs are also in demand at Amazon and Door Dash.

A recent review found many full-time 40-hour workweeks paying $17 an hour for local work and you could earn much more if you have finely refined skills and experience.

If you are feeling like there is a lack of work available, and thinking that there are no traditional seasonal jobs to be had, it would be understandable. Mostly because you cannot see or find them the way you are used to.

Pretty much anyone with a computer and an Internet connection has little to worry about when looking for some extra spending cash, only be aware that there are some criminals who might like to take advantage of your online job search, so exercise your due diligence and check out any potential employer before jumping in to anything.

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Benefits of Working from Home for Employers

While up to 70 percent of small businesses were wiped out by COVID-19 restrictions those left standing were either prepared or quickly adopted work at home models to survive and sustain the long-term effects of a world lost to a pandemic.

While subsidies prolonged the demise of small businesses as the coronavirus continued to spread and the subsidies ceased to provide assistance, businesses began closing at an alarming rate. Now a solid 30 percent of small businesses survive due to previously embracing telecommuting or by discovering ways to modify their business practices enough to adopt some type of telework adaptation or continue to provide services to a customer base that may be on lockdown for an extended period of time.

As the effects of COVID-19 continue to spread, the surviving businesses are discovering there are huge benefits of working from home for employers.

Benefits of Working from Home for Employers

1. Reduction of Operating Expenses

It is far less expensive to support a teleworking workforce. HR expenses are reduced by being able to hire outside of your local geographic base because a teleworking workforce need not be restricted by location. The business is not having to provide the workspace, which is saving an enormous cost in overhead expenses. Leases for office space may still need to be paid for space that is not being used, but the cost of operating and providing services to the employees is greatly reduced or eliminated. Right now, we are seeing a huge number of businesses finding ways to back out of those leases and opting not to renew them, as they plan on continuing to take advantage of the benefits of teleworking post-pandemic.

2. Flexible Work Schedules

Working from home flex-time is one of the important factors that are responsible for the increase in employee productivity where workers are empowered to adjust their work at home schedules to accommodate personal errands, doctor appointments, and family issues. Flextime for telecommuters is also a huge perk when attracting new hires, incentivizing current employees, reducing sick leave, and HR expenses.

3. Increased Productivity

The big surprise for those employers new to the world of telecommuting was shock at the more than 20% increase in employee productivity by allowing them to work from home. Why? Contributing factors include reduction of stress associated with commuting and keeping up appearances and flexible work schedules which help employees to focus more on tasks at hand with fewer interruptions which are inevitable in the office setting.

Remote workers can set up and customize their homework area to their heart’s content. This nesting helps to create a more supportive environment that maximizes everyone’s productivity far exceeding what might be appropriate for decorating one’s office or cubicle.

Generally, remote workers are happier, and this increased enthusiasm can be measured in terms of productivity as well.

It turns out that using more emerging technologies used in connecting, directing, communicating, and even brainstorming with staff over the Internet is saving huge costs associated with inner-office communications and in-house or off-site meetings. Live face-to-face interactions are replaced by using email, text, telephonic interaction, and real-time videoconferencing.

4. Carbon Footprint Reduction

Employers who fully embrace the telecommuting work from home model are helping to make the world a better place by reducing their carbon footprint. By greatly reducing the commute to and from work on a regular basis, employers are helping to reduce toxic emissions.

Even though these are huge benefits of working from home for employers, the transition for the newcomers to the remote working world of these pandemic-inspired times, has been a challenge for many, because we all know too well that it can be difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.

These new tricks include embracing technology to empower a mobile interconnected workforce by using personal devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers, using Wi-Fi-enabled systems like instant messaging, cloud computing, video chat, and VoIP communications. This can be quite a leap for older employees who are not well-acquainted with this tech, while those younger employees, are already using these technologies and are ready to go now.

The biggest concern to overcome is an employer’s paranoia associated with being able to observe the workforce in action while on-the-clock. The idea of having workers out-of-sight is just too much for the micromanager to imagine. Still, there are remote monitoring technologies that can be put in place to track productivity and ease their minds. But be aware that the most successful telecommuting employers are tracking productivity as a whole, not based on minute-by-minute accountability. This allows employees to be accountable for their own productivity, which when empowered to do so, may not work restrictive hours, but are much more likely to stay up late, overwork, or work weekends to keep their numbers up.

 

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The Highest Rental Rates in History and USA Crisis

Right now, amidst the pandemic of 2020, we are seeing the highest rental rates in history and big trouble for the USA, when we’re experiencing a tremendous teleworking urban exodus, rural areas are getting top dollar rents which are a fraction of the metropolitan rental rates which are more common in high tech geographic centers.

Great for those moving from the city to the country, not so much for the locals looking for a place to live because they are having to compete with the city slickers.

Highest Rental Rates

In 2020 rental rates are the highest they have ever been in all states across the USA, with California, Washington DC, and Hawaii seeing the heaviest increases of all.

The Shift from Homeownership to Rental

The tech industry has embraced the idea of renting over ownership, seeing renting as a cost of doing business, a monthly expense without the trappings of being a mortgage holder, enabling the renter to more easily relocate with little notice. This preference to rent over buying a home is spreading all across the United States, as the rental rates rise, as there are now more renters than homeowners who are renting.

2020 Pandemic Challenges

Now comes the 2020 pandemic which has people who previously worked in jobs for employers who are dropping out of the sky like raindrops. The disenfranchised workers were blessed initially with unemployment benefits and a $600 per week, that was then, this is now. The $600 is long gone, and now it’s straight unemployment compensation, which has been extended, but it is hard to make the ends meet, like that.

This is getting to dangerous proportions, as these non-telecommuting unemployed Americans are in trouble and find they are unable to pay their rent. For now, the Center for Disease Control and many states have suspended a landlord’s ability to evict a renter for failure to pay total rents (renters are required to pay something, whatever they can) during the pandemic, essentially allowing these marginal unemployed individuals and families to stay in their housing rent-free. But those days are coming to an end as the moratorium on eviction expires at the end of the year. Then what?

There is some mortgage relief for landlords if they get in trouble for non-rent-payers. They can skip mortgage payments and have them put on the back end of their mortgages without penalty. Even so,

Eviction and Homeless Crisis

With 22 million Americans who have lost their jobs, and 70 percent of them have no job to return to, what will happen when we witness the largest eviction event in history and 40 million people are potentially homeless?

Look for Jobs Online While There’s Still Time

Granted, some of these displaced workers have found their way back into the workforce by securing telecommuting work from home jobs online and they have made themselves bulletproof from the coming housing, eviction, and ensuing homelessness crisis of 2021.

And there’s still time for you, or someone you know, to start to look for some of these telecommuting employment arrangements that are available right now, as this is the season to find jobs online.

 

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Teleworking Urban Exodus

One thing we are learning is that the concept of gathering in congested urban confusion is neither desired nor practical as the current trend of teleworking urban exodus is seeing the workforce relocating from the metropolitan rat race in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, and Boston to rural areas and the countryside, where life is more safe, sane, manageable, meaningful, and less expensive.

Currently, most workers who are telecommuting and working from home in the city, are contemplating the move to outlying geographical areas, even though they are not comfortable with the idea of making the move due to fear that they will be displaced when we return to normal.

The truth is “normal,” the relationship of the pre-pandemic workforce has changed forever. We will never return to things as they were because our whole world and its economy have gone through a major transformation. What exactly the emerging world will look like post-pandemic will look like, we don’t know, but for certain, this “new normal” will be vastly different from the pre-pandemic world we once knew and had adapted ourselves to. It is gone.

Yet, there is this underlying fear that has some COVID-19-restricted teleworkers concerned, asking, “What if we move out of town, only to find that we have to move back?” Regardless, so many people are making the move, after confirming that they can continue to work post-pandemic by telecommuting and working from home.

The most important attribute when considering a new rural location to relocate to is now the issue of connectivity. The communities who already have or are building a strong information network to accommodate this migration of teleworkers are seeing their populations grow and economies expand by welcoming the new Internet-powered employees who require a high-speed connection to take full advantage of local resources.

This is the new sustainable working model that is emerging from the rubble of the coronavirus outbreak.

When I think back to the events of 9/11, I can see how this new normal can be highly beneficial in protecting our workers from a single terrorist attack. With the workforce dispersed widely across the nation or even the globe, it can make any company nearly impervious to any single targeting effort.

Employers who embrace the telecommute working model are thriving because they have access to a wider potential employee database that is unrestrained by geographic limitations and a far lower cost to court and maintain an effective workforce.

The teleworking urban exodus continues to expand

Empowered employees are bargaining with their employers and are able to negotiate, leading with their intention to move to a more distant location, as they are able to say, “I am moving to” (insert location), “and I would like to keep my job.” And employers are eager to accept this new arrangement amidst the emergence of this sustainable work model.

And if you haven’t decided where you might relocate to, you might consider moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma. They are offering a $10,000 cash grant to remote working techies who are willing to relocate to Tulsa and stay for at least a year.

But wait! There’s More: Besides the $10K in cash, Tulsa also supplies you with free workspace, opportunities for community meetups, hangouts, and housing discounts as well. For more information, check out TulsaRemote.com.

So, if you are thinking about telecommuting, moving, or moving your job to an online type of working arrangement, now is the time to take advantage of this new opportunity.

 

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Zoom, Multiple Personality Disorder, and Survival

How many of us regret not buying stock in Zoom’s video platform prior to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when we could have raked in a hefty 600% profit, eh?

Introverts are loving the new work from home paradigm while extroverts are having more challenges with adapting to the new telecommuting arrangement and negotiating the confines and restrictions from being celled-in at home.

Introversive employees are so enthusiastic about the new arrangements that they are gleefully awaiting the news of the continuation of the telework arrangement. It is nearly unanimous among this worker segment that the preference would be to continue to work from home.

The more gregarious the employee, the more they’re having to work from home is not much unlike a prison sentence and they are enthusiastically looking forward to the day they can return to work in a more normal fashion.

In areas of medicine, insurance, negotiations, and masterminding Zooming-in may not be as productive as the old-fashioned face-to-face interactions of the pre-pandemic world we once knew. Any interpersonal contact if far more effective in-person. Zooming is not as effective when communicating. While it is better than voice only, it still cannot replace the face-to-face energetic connection.

When the workforce has been shattered and restricted to pandemic lockdown, Zoom has been able to help maintain connectivity among coworkers in a virtual group meeting setting. Management is reporting that the group online sessions are nearly as effective as brainstorming in the conference room, though it does lack the energy of live interaction.

Far from Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Multiple Personality Disorder, or demon possession, there is a juggling of personality types that are restricted to the home environment which can be challenging. It’s not too difficult to be Clark Kent when you’re sitting at the desk at the Daily Planet, or maintaining your Superman persona when actively fighting crime, but when you are juggling both personalities at home with little time to shift from one to the other, it can be a problem.

The natural effect of this personality management appears to be to allow the emergence of a third entity who is a hybrid composite of the work persona and the home person, which may become problematic as time goes on.

Then what happens when the pandemic restrictions are lifted?

How will we survive?

The expectation Is that things will go back to normal, but that is likely not the case. It is believed that a new normal will emerge but there will be little time to readjust to this new life paradigm. Families will have to quickly adapt in a world that is somewhat recognizable, with new adaptations that will have to be accommodated.

What will education and transportation look like in the new future?

How will the post-pandemic families deal with issues such as childcare, what will be considered “routine,” and how will parents and children navigate the new terrain?

Will the former telecommuting workforce be able to adequately revert to commuting to and from work and sitting at a desk in an office after working from home?

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Working from Home through July 2021 and Beyond Challenges

The latest from King County in Washington State is that employees will be working from home through July 2021 and beyond challenges the online job landscape due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while working moms are having to endure job loss due to kids having to school from home, and churches help to reach out to those who are unable to weather the coronavirus storm.

While the majority of the work in the United States has moved to telecommute and work from home, those who were quick to adapt are enjoying the benefits of doing so, and the employers are loving the decreased overhead and increased productivity.

Barriers to Working from Home

1. Technology Skills

Then there are those who were unable to find adapting to the work at home model less effectively. Many people found the technological challenges as a barrier which they could not navigate successfully. It is so important to overcome this obstacle. Start using your phone, tablet, laptop, computer more.

Use it for fun. Play games, keep in touch with family and friends by text, email, and video chat. When you think of a question that you think you might like to know the answer to, Google it. The more you do these things, the more you are building your technology skill set. This is so important in the world that is emerging from the rubble of the coronavirus pandemic.

Inspirational Seniors

For inspiration, visit any senior center, retirement home, or nursing home, and you will be both surprised and thrilled (and/or challenged) to find most of the residents actively engaged with their cell phones and tablets, which is so impressive to think that only a few years ago, you may have found them quietly sitting around a television. Even though this is the segment of the populace that is most at risk due to COVID-19, now, they are playing games, interacting with family, friends, learning, and discovering new things. Seniors and the elderly are enjoying a higher quality of life thanks to embracing this wave of new tech.

2. Rural Internet Access

There are some rural areas that make telecommuting inaccessible due to a lack of reliable Internet connection(s). These are challenges that are being addressed and circumvented, so as not to be an impassable barrier to telework.

School Internet Access

First off, school districts are funding connectivity for children who are isolated in rural areas with no Internet access to enable these students to school from home. Potential telecommuters in these geographical areas will benefit from this effort. Check with your local school district.

Elon Musk’s Internet Access

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and affordable Starlink Satellite Internet is in the process of being set up and may be available in your area, check it out online at https://www.starlink.com

Coworking Spaces

You may have a local coworking space where members pay a subscription fee or per-use fee to have access to a cubicle or workspace and have access to a fast Internet connection. Google: coworking space near me.

Churches are Helping

Many local churches are answering the call during the pandemic crisis and are making free internet available to the community. No need to enter the church building, which withholds the social distancing restrictions, as anyone is welcomed to come into the parking lot and use their Internet connection at no charge. You will see students studying and teleworkers working thanks to churches providing this invaluable support.

In a time when churches are unable to exercise their services and gatherings in a normal fashion, they are answering the call and raising the bar for assisting their communities during these unprecedented times by providing food, personal protective equipment, and other basic toiletry items such as hand sanitizer, diapers, baby wipes, baby formula, as well as providing care packages to frontline essential workers and mobile showers for the lodging challenged.

Some churches are also providing safe havens for undocumented immigrant children to continue their online studies from inside the church building while supporting and offering sanctuary to these at-risk families. They can provide the ability to telecommute, or provide childcare to enable the household provider to continue to work while maintaining the separation of church and state.

3. Workspace and Equipment

Other barriers that may complicate potential work-from-homers might include the inability to create an effective workspace inside your home and adapting the separation from distractions that are necessary for a successful work from home experience.

Check with your local State-funded employment service, you may be qualified for subsidies to help you overcome these challenges.

4. Online Job Scams

And when you are out there looking for online jobs that you can work from home, be aware that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing as organized crime and criminals who are looking to exploit those who are unaware of the risks of looking for work online. Do not let this dissuade you from your online job search. Do your due diligence and check out any offer before you accept it. Exercise caution when accepting any assignment that might sound too good to be true, it might be a scam.

The dark side of the Internet is fully engaged as hackers and evildoers are exploiting any weakness during the pandemic, and this will ultimately make this space safer and more secure in the future. In the meantime, during this expansive growth process, be mindful and cautious but not fearful.

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Is Pandemic Teleworking a Corporate Conspiracy?

Under the veil of the current COVID-19 pandemic and lingering restrictions and lockdown, corporations have been able to survive by converting operations to telecommuting and moving jobs online to huge benefit to the corporations and first reports seem to indicate that the workers see the conversion as advantageous as well. Is pandemic teleworking a corporate conspiracy?

While there was a growing interest in telecommuting across the nation, there was a growth-spurt which caught on in the shadow of 9/11 promoted by the government, and other industries took note of how important it might be to have staff that could work from home in the event of any disaster, terrorist threat, or pandemic.

Some organizations rejected the idea of enabling staff to telecommute or work from home out of fear. Fear that the working class could not be trusted. These employers and managers feel like they have to micromanage every step their employees take, suspicious that any employee will do as little as possible or nothing at all if they can get away with it and still receive pay.

Then comes the coronavirus outbreak and even the most resistant businesses are faced with hard and fast choices. Do you give up and close your business or quickly find a way to embrace telecommuting to survive? Do you shut down your factory or crowd manufacture?

And those who were resistant to moving jobs online because they could not adequately monitor their staff for fear of slacking off or having employees that would exploit the employer or corporation, new industries sprang to life to meet their concerns and leaving the staff asking the question, “Is your employer spying on you?” and indeed, they are spying on their employees to varying degrees thanks to remote monitoring technologies.

Other technologies experienced growth to meet the need of this expansive growth in telework across the United States, such as videoconferencing, Zoom, and VPN connectivity.

For the other employers and corporations who were already leaning in the direction of telecommuting, the transition was nearly seamless, and this forced experiment delivered staggering results for the corporate number crunchers. The pandemic work from home workforce increased productivity, at huge savings in overhead for the corporations.

It makes you wonder, is there some other purpose at work here, to force people to work from home?

This pandemic lockdown has benefited the ecology of our world amazingly. Mother Earth has not been in such good shape since the industrial revolution, she is healing from the damage we have caused her, right now.

Corporations are more profitable by not having to cater to on-site workforces.

There is a dark side to teleworking which is emerging, but new technologies are emerging to deal with any shortcomings that might be associated with the work-from-homers.

And factories which cannot embrace a crowd manufacturing model, some of them are investing in housing near the factory, hotels, or apartment buildings to accommodate manual laborers which have not been replaced by automation or mechanization.

Is Pandemic Teleworking a Corporate Conspiracy?

Following this pandemic, many corporations and employers will continue to operate remotely, and they are already releasing leases, selling off, or repurposing properties that were necessary to support on-site workers.

Who are the Top 10 beneficiaries of huge financial growth during the pandemic?

1. Amazon.com
2. eBay Inc.
3. Apple
4. Netflix
5. Alphabet
6. FedEx Corp.
7. United Parcel Service
8. Microsoft Corp.
9. Facebook
10. Zoom

What does the Top 10 COVID profiteers say about the current condition if we follow the money? Is there more going on here than meets the eye?

What does the future hold?

What will the workforce look like post-pandemic?

Are we turning into a society of caged slave labor for increased profit?

Or are we being prepared for new advances in societal living, like The Venus Project?

 

 

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Is Your Employer Spying on You?

Here we are in this huge wave to move work from the location determined by the business, company, or organization, to telecommuting and working from the home. Now that you are working from home, is your employer spying on you?

When you’re working on location, on the job site, in the office, in the factory, your work is being monitored to varying degrees by management, via casual live monitoring such as walkthroughs, and looking over your shoulder to utter surveillance via video, telephonic, and software management, filtering, and tracking.

For most companies and organizations, there is a paranoia about tracking employee productivity. In the employee space, there has been a certain degree of trying to manage one’s output and doing as little as possible while looking as though you are being a good employee, so as to warrant you’re being paid for the work that you do.

There is an awareness that the employer will have a level of expectation, and it’s up to each employee to manage that balance in their own way because if one does to do so, his or her days of employment are certainly numbered.

Because management is fearful that there will be slackers in the midst of the employee field, it is on them to ferret them out and send them packing when they are found. So, monitoring the workflow of the labor pool is extremely important to the bottom line.

Now, the pandemic has forced employers to allow much, if not nearly all, of their workforce to telecommute and work from home in order to attempt to survive these unprecedented times.

The fears of management, complicated by not having a more effective way to monitor productivity, has led to a huge growth in the employee tracking and surveillance channel.

If you are not used to being spied on at home while working, and it makes you feel uncomfortable, you may have overlooked how you were being monitored previously by your employer. There’s a good chance that if you are at work, using a company computer, that you have been tracked in a variety of ways, such as surveillance cams, keyboard trackers, periodic screenshots, full network access, and Internet activity, in addition to telephone usage.

Thanks to the Electronic Communications Act of 1986, it is perfectly legal for your employer to track you electronically while you are on the payroll and using company equipment, as long as you have been notified, and notification can be as little as small print on your employee agreement. A lot has changed since 1986, and I could see this being updated thanks to the growth in the telework sector of the United States of late.

Though it may seem like an invasion of privacy because this type of surveillance is happening in your home, it is the nature of the beast, and you have choices.

What are your choices when you’re being spied on by your employer?

  • You can choose to work remotely with your current employer
  • You can negotiate the degree to which you are tracked by your employer
  • You can look for a different employer that is not as fearful

While some employers are obsessed with overseeing the movements (and thoughts if they could) of every employee’s every moment on the time clock, there are others who have other ways to track employee productivity and are more apt to trust their employees to deliver results somewhat self-managed.

It all comes down to you, and what you are comfortable with. The times are changing and you have the right to choose what you will tolerate and what you will not. If you are not liking being electronically micromanaged, then talk to your employer about it to see if you can find a better way to report your productivity when telecommuting and working from home.

If you are unable to reach common ground with your present employer, start looking for something to which you are better suited elsewhere.

See also: Dark Side of Teleworking

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Are Teleworkers Here to Stay?

If you, your company, or organization haven’t already, you must follow the growing trend of telecommuting or working from home and moving more jobs online, not because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but because this is the way businesses will be operated in the future.

Worried mother holding baby and talking on smart phone at home office

The government has led the way by being adaptable and prepared to conduct itself amidst any threat to continue to have work done remotely from home in case of a major terrorist attack, biological warfare, or natural disaster.

Many businesses who are refusing to adapt or are unable to adjust their business model to accommodate shelter in place and pandemic restrictions are rapidly falling by the wayside, allowing only the powerful evolutionaries to survive.

Before the lockdowns were initiated, 75 percent of all workers were confident, that if they were required to stay home, they could effectively perform most, if not all, of their work from home.

For the companies, businesses, organizations, municipal, and federal government agencies that have quickly adopted telecommuting and working from home, they report increases in employee productivity anywhere from 15% to 55%.

Overhead costs to accommodate workers telecommuting during the lockdown been greatly reduced as having to pay for brick-and-mortar facilities for workers can be nearly eliminated, while workers are taking more responsibility for their own performance, requiring less management.

And for the most part, the teleworkers are loving it.

Are teleworkers here to stay?

Teleworkers, just as much as their contemporaries, were growing tired of being among the frantic rat race, and found a sense of empowerment from gaining more control over their quality of life, as they claim to be able to maintain an effective balance between life and work by telecommuting.

Being able to make adjustments to one’s work schedule to make room for appointments, family issues, or errands, offers sensible satisfaction to workers with families. They eat healthier, have less stress, are able to spend more time with family and friends, as well as more leisure time.

Employers who are allowing their employees to work from home are enjoying the fact that unscheduled and sick leave numbers are down 75%. And it’s no surprise because you could continue to work from home with a cold without the fear of spreading it to coworkers. In fact, you could still telecommute while on quarantine. And if you go out for a surgery or treatment, you are apt to return to telework much sooner than a job on campus.

While most people are feeling relief from the daily struggle of life, 80% of those who are confined to their homes without work, would rather be working from home, are willing to take a pay cut to do so, and they are envious of those who are teleworking in these unprecedented times.

The lockdown has placed undue stress on local law enforcement with the rise in domestic violence calls, but this has been offset by a huge reduction is traffic accidents due to the huge reduction in commuting traffic to and from work.

It is likely that this is the new normal, that telecommuting will replace archaic commuting to and from work following the pandemic. Look at the benefits.

Rural employees can work for metro-area employers with no problem, greatly expanding HR’s access to new and emerging talent. Disabled workers may be as much, or more, productive as their non-disabled peers. Discrimination is nearly non-existent. Personality conflicts among the workforce are all but eliminated.

Employee performance is evaluated on performance only.

Employees may continue to interface with their families or act as caregivers without affecting their work status. Disabled workers need not fret over figuring out how to make travel considerations.

Telecommuters enjoy an extra two to three weeks’ worth of free time every year, simply due to working from home and not having to commute.