Information Systems

Interactive Session Organizations

Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Make Working from Home the New Normal?

As COVID-19 continued to spread around the globe, companies large and small started to make changes

to the way they work, shuttering their offices and requiring most or all of their employees to work

remotely from their homes.

During the pandemic, ClearRisk, which offers integrated, cloud-based software solutions for claims,

fleet, incident, and insurance certificate management had its entire staff working from home.

Many large law firms, including Reed Smith, Baker McKenzie, and Nixon Peabody, closed offices and

required work at home during the pandemic. The law firms emphasized that they could continue to

serve clients despite office closings and remote work.

OpenText Corp., a Canadian provider of enterprise information management products, plans to

eliminate more than half of its 120 offices globally, with 2000 of its 15,000-person workforce working

from home permanently.

In mid-May 2020, Twitter Inc. notified employees that most of them could work from home indefinitely.

According to a recent MIT report, 34 percent of Americans who previously commuted to work stated

that they were working from home by the first week of April 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Prior to the pandemic, the number of people regularly working from home remained in the single digits,

with only about 4 percent of the US workforce working from home at least half the time. However, the

trend of working from home had been slowly gaining momentum thanks to advances in information

technology for remote work and changes in corporate work culture. The coronavirus pandemic may

mark a tipping point.

It’s likely that many people who started working from home for the first time during the pandemic will

continue to do so thereafter. New health guidelines about distancing will require some workplaces to

expand to accommodate all their employees or to have a significant percentage of employees work

permanently from home.

Information technologies driving these changes include broadband high-speed Internet connections,

laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, email, messaging, and videoconferencing tools. As companies

shift their work from face-to-face to remote, video conferencing is becoming the new normal for

meetings. People are trying to have good conversations, share critical information, generate new ideas,

reach consensus, and make decisions quickly on this platform.

Although less than ideal for face-to-face interactions, videoconferencing is becoming more powerful and

affordable. There are many options, including Skype, Skype for Business, Zoom, Microsoft Teams,

Amazon Chime, BlueJeans, Cisco’s WebEx, GoToMeetings, and Google Meet. Some business people are

using the same tools they do in their personal communications, such as FaceTime and Facebook

Messenger. (FaceTime now supports group video chat with up to 32 people.)

Video conference software such as WebEx and BlueJeans appears designed for more corporate uses.

Other software such as Microsoft’s Skype and Zoom feels more consumer-friendly and easier to set up,

with free or low-cost versions suitable for smaller businesses. Skype works for video chats, calls, and

instant messaging and can handle up to 50 people in a single video call. Skype allows calls to be

recorded in case someone misses a meeting. Skype also provides file-sharing capabilities, caller ID,

voicemail, a split view mode to keep conversations separate, and screen share on mobile devices.

Up to 1,000 users can participate in a single Zoom video call, and 49 videos can appear on the screen at

once. Zoom includes collaboration tools like simultaneous screen-sharing and co-annotation, and the

ability to record meetings and generate transcripts. Users can adjust meeting times, select multiple

hosts, and communicate via chat if microphones and cameras are turned off.

There are definite benefits to remote work: lower overhead, more flexible schedules, reductions in

employee commuting time and attrition rates, and increases in productivity. (Many companies reported

that productivity did not suffer when employees worked at home during the pandemic.) According to

Global Workplace Analytics, a typical company saves about $11,000 per half-time telecommuter per

year. Working remotely also poses challenges.

Not all employees have access to the Internet at home, and many work in industries that require on-site

work. About 80 percent of American adults have high-speed broadband Internet service at home.

However, according to a Pew Research Center study, racial minorities, older adults, rural residents, and

people with lower levels of education and income are less likely to have in-home broadband service. In

addition, one in five American adults access the Internet only through their smartphones. Employees

with little children or small apartments find working at home more difficult.

Full-time employees are four times more likely to have remote work options than part-time employees.

According to Global Workplace Analytics, a typical remote worker is college-educated, at least 45 years

old, and earns an annual salary of $58,000 while working for a company with more than 100 employees.

Although email and text messaging are very useful, they are not effective tools for communication

compared to the information exchange and personal connection of face-to-face conversations. Remote

work also inhibits the creativity and innovative thinking that take place when people interact with each

other face-to-face, and videoconferencing is only a partial solution. Studies have found that people

working together in the same room tend to solve problems more quickly than remote collaborators, and

that team cohesion suffers when members work remotely.