Tag: telecommute

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Telecommuters Don’t Get Caught Doing This

If you worked in an office or other on-site location job which has transitioned into telecommuting, there are important things to keep in mind. There is a lot of talk about what to do to be a good telecommuter but rarely are you cautioned about the things not to do. Being caught doing any of these things could mean the end of your remote working career.

Top 5 Things Not to Get Caught Doing as a Telecommuter

1. Disregarding How it Was

The less dissimilar you can keep your work environment when working from home from on-site work, the better. Of course, you are no longer at the office, so there is a great deal of difference, but try to keep the way you go about conducting your business tasks as similar to the way you would conduct yourself when working on-site. Keep your daily routine as similar as possible.

2. Babysitting

Okay, it is not babysitting unless it is someone else’s kids, but do not be caught being the childcare provider when you should be on-the-clock working. It is nearly impossible to be fully functional while maintaining a positive level of job performance while trying to manage one or more children at the same time. Find someone to take the responsibility of looking after your children while you are working. They could still be in your home, where you will be working, but do not let them distract you, and enjoy the extra time you have to be with them while on break periods.

3. Working in Bed

Yu are telecommuting, you can work anywhere, right? Technically, “Yes,” you can work anywhere and in any state of undress that suits you (even naked) but by becoming too lax in your work efforts, like working in bed, your pajamas, the hot tub, or sprawled out on the sofa, you are not projecting the right kind of energy into your work, and sooner or later, your job performance will decline because of it.

So, create a separate “office space” for you to perform your job tasks. It doesn’t have to be a separate office if space does not permit (but the more separation, the better), but a unique spot with a chair that you can sit upright in would be good. Decorate it any way you want, like you might your own cubicle at work. Just make sure this space, wherever it is, is reserved for work only, and your performance levels will not falter.

4. Allowing Interruptions

Just do not do it. Do not allow the kids, the dog, your spouse, your friends, or your family to interrupt you when you are working from home. I know, the temptation is there. Normally when you are at home you are accessible simply by being present. You need to establish boundaries and let your people know that when you are at your home office space and you are working, they need to wait their turn(s).

5. Being Unconscious of Noise

When you are working from home it is easy to get used to the ambient noise that surrounds you. Your conscious mind just sort of blocks it out, but if you are on a conference call, everyone can hear that noise, the kids in the background, the dogs, the washer, the TV in the next room, and it can all be very distracting.

You may not be able to eliminate the noise altogether, but maybe you could find a remote location, like a closet, that you can use for a phone booth of sorts. If not, then at the very least, you can apologize for the uncontrollable noise and mute your mic or phone until it is your turn to speak.

Keep doing the best you can, and we will all get through this, as we emerge into the new normal together.

 

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Operations Following Lifted Pandemic Restrictions

Here we are, in the new world of the telecommuting future thanks to the impetus of the pandemic. Operations following lifted pandemic restrictions will include telework, flexible work hours, working from home, home office, coworking spaces, and turning to jobs online, all a part of the new normal, a metamorphosis in the workforce of the post-pandemic world.

Fortunately, all the necessary technology is readily available for employers to adapt to telecommuting and remote working as we ready to return to the new normal and beyond.

If your business or organization is not already remote-work-savvy now is the time to ready for the new digitally enhanced workplace following in the footsteps of other businesses and organizations that vow to never return to archaic pre-pandemic methods of operating their businesses.

Everything You Need is Here

Some of the first places to look for digitally upgrading your teleworking environment would include software to communicate with and monitor staff, applications for scheduling projects and task management, training programs, and security solutions.

The Top 10 Attributes of Post-pandemic Operations

1. Structure

Organizational structure is important to layout as early as possible for establishing hierarchy and accountability among the digital workforces. The better your structure is formatted, the more secure your remote workers will be adapting to the work from home model. Though, not all your personnel will be working from home. Some staff may still be coming into work, even if only for a day or two per week, then teleworking the remainder of the time. You will have to figure out what works best for your organizational structure.

2. Empower Staff

By empowering your staff to take responsibility for their own tasks, you add the necessary and most impactful component of flexibility to your team. This also relieves you from the responsibility of monitoring each and every employee. Take your attention off of the minute details and focus on the while, allowing each employee to manage themselves.

3. Communicate

Keeping the line of communications open is very important, and especially allowing and encouraging staff to reach out if they are feeling overwhelmed by any piece of the task at hand. Team chat tools can allow team members to stay in contact and report ideas to problem-solve on the fly.

4. Performance Evaluation

Performance evaluation in the new normal is conducted on a large-scale, then at several levels below by reviewing strategic Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure the overall performance of the organization, each team, and for problem-solving, each employee. All efforts can be traced to ensure the success of the organization.

5. Motivation

You might choose to use virtual boards to keep employees motivated (though these only work if everyone is on board, using, and regularly updating them).

6. Culture

The biggest organization-wide tele-employee advantage with the most impact on your overall performance is to establish a positive work culture. Working remotely should be a celebration of all the best attributes of an organization and its employees culminating in a joyous performance.

7. Empathetic Correction

Of course, there will be slumps in individual and team performance which will need to be addressed along the way but do so in a compassionate and empathetic manner. No one should ever feel like they are being punished or threatened by, “It’s my way or the highway,” which is considered barbaric in the current workforce marketplace.

8. Trust and Support

Employees perform better when they are able to accept their own responsibility within the most flexible parameters, and when they feel supported and trusted.

9. Non-work-related Socials

Digital non-work-related social events can help to take the edge off of staff which is feeling the pressure of being on lockdown resulting from a pandemic and executive restrictions. So, feel free to be creative and support Zoom meetings that are just for fun. Maybe a staff talent contest, show off your work-crib competition, fashion review, pet show, cooking show, or host an online karaoke show. Anything to take the edge off potential cabin fever or blues from isolation.

10. Affinity

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” so apply the “non-work-related” label as often as possible when reaching out to and communicating with your employees. The creates affinity among your organization and will put you miles ahead in employee retention.

 

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The COVID Work from Home Experiment

There has been a great deal of anticipation about the COVID work from home experiment, and it appears that the upside is the many benefits of remote work which has generally improved the performance of office workers by nearly 30% in productivity with very low overhead costs. A huge win in the workforce in the United States of America.

Even with the overwhelmingly positive results and huge benefits to the bottom lines of companies and organizations who have successfully embraced (and cashed-in on) the telecommute work-from-home model has not without its challenges.

At the very least, Internet connectivity, having the basic electronic devices required, being able to have an effective workspace within the home, and managing family around the home office are the basic requirements to have nailed down in the beginning.

The first real concern to show up was paranoia among management. “How can we be expected to trust employees working from home?” The first wave of response was to attempt to initiate surveillance efforts to micromanage remote workers. The results appear to indicate counterproductivity as initial increases in productivity began to decline.

In the new world of the telecommuter, a reasonable degree of trust must be part of the foundation of the teleworking agreement. Employers must find other ways and means of tracking individual employee productivity over time, besides looking over the shoulder of staff members.

After all, they are working from home, which means they could be doing practically anything from drinking on the job to working naked for all we know (and they are).

Nevertheless, for the companies and organizations who fully embrace the idea of staff working from home, their number are up, and expenses are down.

While all the numbers are looking good, it appears that telecommuters in the $150,000-range (and up) are seeing the greatest increase in productivity and value to the employers during this period of time when we are testing the waters of sending workers home to work.

At the same time, other industries that do not translate as well to the telework atmosphere, are barely staying alive, and some of them are closing their doors forever. Channels such as manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, and hospitality, are experiencing the greatest challenges and struggle for survivability during these unprecedented times.

Telecommuters are facing their own set of challenges, such as a general decline of overall mental health, while family viability in workers’ households is declining at an alarming rate, causing some parents to have to make a choice between work and family.

One of the biggest issues for remote workers to tackle is how to manage work tasks amid the various distractions that might vie for one’s attention in a work from home environment. This is in huge contrast to being secluded in a safe and sane corporate office setting, where very little effort need be exerted to focus on tasks at hand.

Instead of the brief interactions that may distract you briefly at the office, home office interruptions may include anything from doorbells, phones ringing, dishes in the sink, impatient children and/or pets desiring attention, and the list goes on and on.

Kids at home who are attending schools remotely online are also a growing concern for telecommuters.

Being able to set up a home office space that has separations from the rest of the household and establishing boundaries seems to help remote workers manage distractions that might otherwise negatively affect their overall performance.

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Who Will Continue to Work from Home?

Employers are going to be faced with the question and having to decide, “Who stays working from home post-pandemic?” and the answer may not be what you expected. While the average productivity is clearly up by 23% or more for telecommuters working from home during these unprecedented times, if employers are going to have to select only, let us say, 25% of the workforce to continue to work from home, who will it be?

Who Will Continue to Work from Home?

The word on the management street is that the first choices will be the highest-paid employees, those making $150,000 or more per year.

If you are earning under that dividing number, you may find it disconcerting, but remember your employer is looking after his bottom line, the return on his/her investment.

If you are making $150,000 per year, you are earning $75.00 an hour. Think about it. If your employer is paying you $75.00 an hour to stay home, the company or organization is making a $17.25 return on their workforce expenditure on that employee every hour. They only pay $75.00 per hour but receive a $92.25 return on that investment (ROI). That’s $34,500 in their pocket every year.

That is a full-time $17.50 per hour employee free for a year. Though clever management would most likely make far better use of over thirty grand than pick up a free low-wage employee.

If you are making $30.00 per hour ($58,500 per year) $6.90 per hour on your working from home. Still, $13,455-a-year is not chump change.

You can see why those higher-paid employees are going to get first dibs on the telecommuting gigs following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions. It is all a matter of working the numbers. It is also clear that if your performance has only been on an even keel since you have been working from home (that means your performance value has stayed the same and you are not a part of the remote workers who have increased their performance from working from home), you more than likely will be invited to return to work.

On the other hand, many employers will not be forced to make such hard decisions. These are the companies and organizations who are rejoicing at the lockdowns, excited about letting most, if not all, of their staff home, or taking volunteers who may prefer to return to the life of the commuter.

73% of forced pandemic telecommuters are actually hoping to return to work at the office. Many of them will be disappointed when they find out that they are having to stay home to work after the coronavirus debacle.

These employers are already scurrying to get out of their leases, and they not only could not care if you returned to the office, but they don’t even want you to think about coming back. These organizations are the best-positioned to not only survive -but thrive – post-pandemic because they are making the extra 23% in productivity, plus cutting huge overhead costs.

And if you are thinking that you can help to glean a little more take home at the end of the month by cutting your expenses and moving to the country? Be aware that, generally, Silicon Valley is cutting the salaries of employees who are moving away to save on expenses, which splits the difference (savings) roughly in half. Half for the employer and half for the employee.

As unfair as it may sound, it is happening now and is setting the standard for things to come.

Something else to keep in mind.

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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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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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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.