Work from home – a forced measure or new reality?

Just after few weeks of self-isolation many employers have started to claim that their employees had quickly adapted to work from home breaking all the records with respect to the efficiency. Let's have a look at this short-term phenomenon and also consider whether employees would want to return to their normal working format after the end of the pandemic.

People who are by nature need society will never get used to work from home. Today it is just a forced measure, not a way to improve workers’ efficiency. Let's turn to the experience of the IT sphere. Specialists in this field who have always preferred freelance began to rapidly return to the office 5 years ago because only teamwork in specially created conditions can bring business to a new level.
Work from home has its own side effects. And not the last role in these effects is played by studio apartments which are so popular among young people today. Imagine the situation - you and your soul mate have a meeting via Skype. So, my question is how to manage to hold an important meeting online and not prevent another member of the family to do the same living in the room 4 by 4 meters? Often in a compact home there is simply no room for comfortable working conditions (backrest chair, table, office equipment), and I don’t talk about the noise, which cannot be avoided in new densely populated LCDs. I doubt that the government will want to amend the silence law because of remote job.

Unfortunately, not all issues can be solved online unless you have your own corporate connection, the security of which you are 100% sure. In addition, technical progress does not allow you to enter into transactions online yet. Live communication will not be canceled by any pandemic.
Spike in productivity of employees at a remote job is very easy to explain. The thing is, no one can afford to relax today. Low efficiency means loss of business and job respectively. That's why people in emergency situation turn on all their instincts. When a person doesn’t feel pressure, he begins to work more slowly every day. According to statistics, only 10-15% of people can work at home as efficiently as in the office.

Another disadvantage of working from home is the lack of sufficient measures to control the productivity of employees. The bigger the company, the harder it is to track workers KPI. Free solutions are beginning to be much less suitable, and commercial solutions are becoming too expensive.

There are some activities, in particular design activities, which are not designed for online mode. In online mode, this format is no longer effective.

Forced self-isolation measures will soon form an acute demand from people for socialization and live communication. If in last year 60% of people between 18 and 34 years in the UK feel lonely (46% in the US), it is scary to imagine how much more this figure will increase after the pandemic.
You have to understand that the world will never be the same. The current situation shows how important it is to be flexible, effective and able to adapt quickly to changing conditions. And the new formats of office spaces will help them do it.
Konstantin Korolev, head of the GrowUp covorking network