The excitement around remote work reached fever pitch during the pandemic, when most people with an office job were forced to work from home. This opened up conversations about what the future of work looks like, with a lot of attention paid to remote and hybrid models as well as how employees can maintain an acceptable work-life balance.
But as the world returns to “normal,” what does the future of work look like from where we are today? To find out, we spoke with six founders who are working in relevant sectors.
The founders shared a broad set of opinions on what we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years, tying that to visions of what they expect for the future. They had a lot of thoughts about working from home, returning to the office, and finding hybrid solutions that fall somewhere between the two.
“Somewhere around 2012, it was peak Google campus. If you worked for any of the tech companies, you basically lived on campus,” said Phil Libin, CEO of Mmhmm. “I think during the pandemic, it swung back in the other direction, and now there’s not even a place to go and you’re on your own for everything.”
Many of the founders we spoke with recognize that there needs to be a balance, despite the various ways that work gets done. “For us to demand 100% office work would have been madness, so we chose to stay competitive and make sure talented people aspired to work with us,” said Barnaby Lashbrooke, founder and CEO of Time etc.
Managers used to managing in-person have had to change how they evaluate employees and how they keep everyone engaged; it’s no longer possible to rely on vibes to measure employee happiness and success. You have to change how you track productivity when your workforce is distributed.
“I think the biggest issue is team culture. How does your team do the work together? How do you encourage them to spend time together doing the work, not just trading back and forth and being really slow? How does management get a sense for how the work is being done together?” said Alexander Embiricos, CEO of Multi. “I think that’s actually more of a problem than managers realize, because they just can’t feel it.”
Read on to find out what companies in the space are doing to help organizations maintain and track distributed workforces, how the new paradigm of working remotely affects employees and training, and what they think is most necessary at the moment.
We spoke with:
- Barnaby Lashbrooke, founder and CEO of virtual assistant company Time etc.
- Alexander Embiricos, CEO of collaboration app Multi
- Phil Libin, CEO of meeting and presentation software Mmhmm
- Sophie Ruddock, COO of next-generation learning platform Multiverse
- Matt Martin, CEO of Clockwise, an AI-powered calendaring app
- Mandy Price, CEO of diversity and inclusion assessment company Kanarys
Barnaby Lashbrooke, founder and CEO, Time etc.
The pandemic made thinking about the “future of work” a lot more urgent. What were the biggest things you’ve seen shift in the past three years? Did any of those shifts surprise you?
Being forced to go remote during the pandemic was a curveball, not a hospital pass. Our thinking, and what we did after the pandemic, was heavily influenced by the workforce. As life started to go back to some kind of normal, we started interviewing more and more candidates who were leaving their workplaces because of a lack of flexible working. Many told us they were actively only speaking to potential employers who offered it.
For us to demand 100% office work would have been madness, so we chose to stay competitive and make sure talented people aspired to work with us. The job-seeker shift in attitude has largely driven our policies on work.
What are the biggest unsolved problems you see in the future of work space right now?
This might not be the answer you’re expecting, but it’s actually reliable, affordable internet access. Yes, it’s 2023 — the year of AI going mainstream — but helping employees get access to superfast broadband that doesn’t drop out during video calls is still a major challenge for our team. Even if we wanted to fund better access, we often can’t.
One of the big shifts we’ve seen in this space is toward remote work. In your mind, what are the biggest benefits and challenges to enabling employees to work from home?
It has been a leveler. In the office, dominant personalities tended to step up and take the lead, while quieter, less forthcoming individuals slipped into the background. Going remote four days a week has seemed to level the playing field. It has given everyone a chance to take responsibility and be accountable in turn. I think this has to do with the different ways we communicate. Oozing confidence in a meeting in the office can be much more daunting than piping up and volunteering to lead on a project in a Slack chat.
Supporting junior members of staff. All of us who are over a certain age can remember going into a workplace for the first time. It’s an overwhelming few months of observing, noticing, overhearing and learning by osmosis. That just doesn’t translate in the virtual workplace. They don’t get that immediate feedback, and they just won’t pick up soft skills as quickly.
A sensible balance between remote and in-person has worked for us. Just because companies can now work fully remotely over a wide geographic area doesn’t mean all companies should. In fact, we’ve hired people from companies that went fully remote and killed their businesses because their cultures and support systems were lost with the change. We onboard new hires in-person for their first two weeks. It helps them to orientate, bond with colleagues and understand our culture.
Scheduling in-person time with our teams is essential. We bring teams together once every week in the office, which fosters collaboration and is an asset to our culture. We’ve introduced benefits like free chef-cooked lunches twice a week in our offices to facilitate this. We also have coaches rather than managers who contribute heavily to our culture of learning. They do a fantastic job of helping our employees to achieve more and develop their soft skills.
Alexander Embiricos, CEO, Multi
The pandemic made thinking about the “future of work” a lot more urgent. What were the biggest things you’ve seen shift in the past three years? Did any of those shifts surprise you?
There were some really big shifts and then a lot of it got unwound. We’re in this new spot where some of the stuff we were arguing about doesn’t matter anymore. And some irreversible changes have been made.
I was working on this tool called Remotion; it was a virtual office. We launched right as the pandemic was getting started, and at that time, everyone was just trying to figure out how to work from home, like most people. Only a very small number of companies had been working from home. But all the pre-COVID remote companies were very async first, so we had a bunch of people who were used to talking synchronously trying to figure out how to do it.
It seemed for a while that maybe there would be a lot of openness towards working remotely. I think all of us remote work founders thought to ourselves: “OK, if our products are good enough, then this can stick. And if we don’t quite build the right products quickly enough, then it won’t stick.”
We also thought that there would be a wave of remote-first tooling that would enable remote work. But we were completely wrong. There isn’t much room in the market for remote-only tooling. Instead, every tool has to be remote-friendly; it has to be multiplayer, and it has to support both synchronous and asynchronous work.
So if you think of tools that people have been discussing a lot recently — Figma, Notion, Slack — they’re all really good for remote teams. None of them are specifically for remote teams, they’re all multiplayer and they all support synchronous and asynchronous modalities. That’s one thing. There was a shift towards remote work, obviously, but it turns out the set of tools that really helps those teams were not actually remote work tools.
Remote work is no longer really the discussion point. Where things are going now, if you can meet in person, you should. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes, more die-hard teams, especially smaller ones, will try to have as many people hired in-person. But in general, people have had a taste of the fact that the best talent in the world is not all in your city, and it’s just too good of a deal to pass up on that talent.
Most teams will maintain some openness to hiring people wherever that talent lives. It won’t be so much like remote or not remote. Rather, some of the best practices for remote teams will have to be put in place by every team. Like being more transparent by default; like better note-taking; more considered decision-making.
What are the biggest unsolved problems you see in the future of work space right now?
People are returning to the office, and the question is, why are they doing that? Teams want their leaders to be doing more stuff to get team culture right and they want more of that energy from the team. It feels like a heavy-handed way to do it, but perhaps it is reasonable if you are willing to pay the cost.
In the middle of COVID, team and culture was also important. Whenever we spoke to team leaders, they would tell us that team culture was top-of-mind. We could spend hours talking about it with them; at the time, people weren’t really sure what made sense, so a lot of new social angles were brought to team culture. For example: Let’s organize happy hours, or let’s try to do remote escape rooms, or let’s use team off-sites and in-person meetups, once those are possible, to bring the team together.
Broadly, the biggest issue is team culture, and then I would break that down into a couple of sub-challenges. The real one is: How does your team do the work together? How do you encourage them to spend time together doing the work, not just trading back and forth and being really slow? A related problem is: How does management get a sense of how the work is being done together?
That’s actually more of a problem than managers realize, because they just can’t feel it. So they feel like it’s broken, but actually, it’s going really well. You need to be thinking differently about how you measure that.
The third problem is the softer social culture, which helps with retention, trust and cross-org relationships. At bigger companies, how do you get someone in marketing to be friends with someone in engineering? That’s really helpful for the company, but normally, it’d be hard for them to interact.
One of the recurring themes around remote work is company culture and the related challenges of a fully remote onboarding process. The office has often played a major role on that front: How do you see this challenge being overcome?
For early-career people, the learning and networking opportunities of relocating to a major city are really valuable. I don’t believe we should abolish all in-person work. If you’re early in your career, there are a lot of benefits to moving to New York or wherever, and meeting people there and doing your first onboarding in-person. Once you’re an experienced worker, you can start to make more decisions around which community you want to be in full-time.
So to answer the question, it’s really through structured intentionality. That’s preparing the right amount of documentation, making sure the manager has time to spend with a new hire. I hope most companies are like this, but if you’re the type of company that cares about relationship-building beyond your immediate peers, then you’ve got to schedule those coffee chats, you have to have other people with the company reach out. You need to make sure that your company’s knowledge is accessible in a way that doesn’t require you to be in the room. So yeah, sorry, very standard answer. But that’s how we solve it.
There’s a lot of these remote best practices that people have realized are simply good in general. So they’re importing them into their hybrid teams or putting them into their remote teams. What I’m seeing a bit of, and I hope this really continues, is that those best practices are slowly no longer viewed as things that you have to think about because you’re hiring a remote person; rather, they’re seen as things you do because this is how the best teams work.
Phil Libin, CEO, Mmhmm
The pandemic made thinking about the “future of work” a lot more urgent. What were the biggest things you’ve seen shift in the past three years? Did any of those shifts surprise you?
I realized that a lot of what I’d been doing before, as a CEO and as an investor, didn’t make any sense. We spent a lot of money and time creating a really nice office building. We paid a ton of money to bus people to it every morning. On average, it was a 90-minute commute each way, so people were spending three hours a day sitting in traffic. That’s asinine. I am never in my life going to ask someone to waste three hours every day commuting to a place. I’m never going to do it myself.
There’s a lot of things that we took for granted — what meetings were, how we communicated, what it meant to be productive — that the pandemic forced everyone to question and revisit. As the pandemic has died down, it has become a lot more turbulent. The world is split right now. Some people are saying that it’s all in the rearview mirror and we should go back to how things were. Other people are saying, well, nobody has ever gone back to anything in the history of civilization. There is no going back, as time only goes in one direction.
It’s interesting. We’ll see how things shake out.
Have any of those shifts surprised you? Like most of something new, you really didn’t see coming?
I’m surprised by the magnitude of some of the pushback right now in trying to get everyone back into the office. I think it’s short-lived and more dramatic than I expected it to be.
I didn’t expect serious companies to try really hard to get people to do something that obviously they don’t want to. I expected things to be more like, well, people aren’t cattle, so we’re not going to force them to group together. I knew that some people would do it, but it was more than I expected.
What is the biggest unsolved frustration you’re seeing in the future-of-work space right now?
Well, all frustrations are unsolved. I think that the expectation of what work is, really is up in the air right now. When I started out working in the ’90s, there was a traditional office with office hours. Sure, programmers might pull all-nighters, but you’d show up at the office, you work, you dressed a certain way. There was a clear delineation between office and personal stuff.
And then somewhere around 2012, it was peak Google campus. If you worked for any of the tech companies, you basically lived on campus. It provided for your every need. You had all the food, all your spiritual needs, your laundry, all of your friends, the people you were dating, all in one place. If there was any political activity, you just found a group of like-minded people in your company. It did everything for people, which I remember thinking at the time was great. If you wanted a kebab, you went to a kebab stand in the office, and it was free. Fantastic! The downside was that there was no life outside work.
During the pandemic, it swung back in the other direction and now there’s not even a place to go; you’re on your own for everything. But then Slack became pretty toxic. It was the only way to communicate, and it’s easier to say mean things when you’re not seeing people for real. It’s been back and forth, and the pendulum’s swinging again.
There’s a great diversity of expectations about what work is supposed to be and what your relationship to the company is. If there’s a mismatch between what you think work is and what and where you work, that’s going to be very frustrating. We’ve tried, in the past year, to really be clear about this: This is how we want people to act and how we will act in return, and trying to reestablish that social contract between the company and its employees.
That’s all up in the air. It’s going to be really different in 10 years.
Do you feel like there’s a specific problem that is going unsolved in that, like, I feel in the abstract, I agree with you, but it’s a specific thing that you wish somebody was working on?
There’s a lot of stuff that you used to get at the office as an employee, but poorly. Now you don’t get it at all, but poorly is better than nothing. What I wish is that people would invent the much better versions of these things.
For example, mentorship. If you’re all sitting together in the office, you get mentors. People who are earlier in their careers receive decent mentorship. Now it’s super patchy, and it really depends on whether your boss happens to be a good mentor and what the political situation in the office is like. Mentorship being primarily something that you got from more senior employees in a physical office environment was never a good solution, but it was a solution.
If you eliminate that completely, then what do we do? I’d like somebody to figure out a way that I can pay for, as an employer, to have really high-quality mentorship for people that will be much better than what you used to get in the office.
There’s a bunch of stuff that follows that pattern. How do you do performance reviews? Or what is even the point of performance reviews? You know, when I used to evaluate how good someone was, in my past life, we had all sorts of systems. But a lot of it just comes down to: Does the person look busy? Are they in the office when I come in? Are they still in the office when I leave? Do they look like they’re working hard?
Subconsciously, that’s a big part of it. Then when you’re not seeing many people, or it’s very spotty, you lose that. You’ve kind of gone from a very poor system performance evaluation to no system of performance evaluation.
That explains part of the panic for companies wanting to go back to the office. But I don’t want to go back to doing it poorly, either. I want to go forward and do things well. But we need to invent those processes.
What are the biggest challenges for remote work?
Everything worthwhile is challenging. So there’s lots of questions that need to be experimented with and need to be answered, including how often do you get together and who gets together. What’s the point of it? What’s your basic business? What is the basic communication flow? What are you doing synchronously?
The biggest success we’ve had is being thoughtful about communication styles. We’ve said there’s in-person communications, there’s synchronous video communications, like what you and I are doing right now, and then there’s asynchronous video with recorded video. All three of those are really good at some things and really bad at other things. So we’re trying to decouple, deconstruct communication into these three categories, and say: We’re going to do the thing that’s best in each category for each category.
For example, it turns out that in-person communication is actually pretty bad at explaining things. Everyone has to be there on time, at the same place, and everyone has to be ready and paying attention. You can’t quite go back to something, and it’s hard to show visual examples. Everyone has to learn at the same speed and at the same time. This is bad in many ways. If someone has a question, that question is something that everyone has to hear and listen to, even if they don’t care. So explaining things is much better done over recorded video.
But Q&A, live participation and stuff is better done on live video than in person. For example, all of the design brainstorming that we do is so much better in Figma. That’s a bunch of us in Figma, on video, moving things around, and voting and doing that stuff. It’s superior to what we used to do in person, which is pile into a conference room and put sticky notes on things and yell at each other.
But then other things, like building motivation, commitment, deepening relationships — those are much better done in person. But in person doesn’t mean in an office in a conference room, in some boring place showing slides. It means having experiences.
The challenges that I find the most rewarding, that have been the most rewarding over the past 18 months, is experimenting with exactly what we do in person, and when and how often we do it, and with whom. A lot of companies need to do that; I don’t think a lot have done it yet.
Sophie Ruddock, COO, Multiverse
The pandemic made thinking about “future of work” a lot more urgent. What were the biggest things you’ve seen shift in the past three years? Did any of those shifts surprise you?
We have seen 10+ years of digital transformation in a matter of a couple of years, meaning that the current workforce requires a fundamentally different skill set than the ones that exist today. Businesses not only need to focus on staying ahead of new technologies — generative AI, for example, has exposed the pace of transformations that companies and workers will face in the years to come — but ensuring that they have the digital and technical skills in their workforce to be able to thrive with these changes. We’re in the upward curve of this transformation, and tech, data and engineering skills will be vital in the future of work.
Alongside this, we’ve seen an acknowledgment that the future of work also means building a much more representative workforce and looking within for more diverse talent: Reskilling their existing staff, possibly those in frontline positions, to do the in-demand jobs of the future. This shift is being driven by the importance companies place on diversity. DEI is viewed as a strategic priority, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s proven to improve business results.
What is the biggest unsolved frustration you’re seeing in the future-of-work space right now?
There’s an unprecedented shortage of technical and data skills in workforces. Part of the problem is that the university and college system simply isn’t producing nearly enough graduates with the in-demand skills, nor does the classroom model of learning equip graduates with the right skills needed to transition and add value in the ever-changing workplace.
We see the solution here as apprenticeships. Apprenticeships enable businesses to build the competencies of their workforces with the knowledge, skills and behaviors that they need, and tap into pools of remarkable but overlooked talent. Half the U.S. workforce doesn’t have college degrees, and those workers are locked out of the best roles by arbitrary degree requirements.
Matt Martin, CEO, Clockwise
The pandemic made thinking about “future of work” a lot more urgent. What were the biggest things you’ve seen shift in the past three years? Did any of those shifts surprise you?
Going remote significantly increased the complexity of our workdays. Overnight, we had to consider more preferences and constraints that made getting work done with each other much more difficult.
While the initial shift was near-instantaneous, establishing the new norms has proven to be much more complex. Many companies hoped a swift “return to office” movement would automatically resolve the challenges of working remotely. Yet, because the pendulum swung so far in the direction of remote, even with the current correction, we are still radically more remote than where we were pre-pandemic. Flexibility is now baked into our cultural expectations, which may be one of the biggest shifts we’ve ever seen in the modern workplace. There are few companies that are requiring workers to come back to the office five days a week, and when they are, it’s often met with resistance. Hybrid work is here to stay.
The pandemic also ignited conversations around mental health and burnout at work, encouraging businesses to rethink their approach to building sustainable work culture. With the recent shift in the tech labor market, however, these conversations have receded as businesses hit by the macroeconomic correction focus intensely on efficiency and cost reductions. Layoffs are happening across the tech sector, in particular, and businesses are squeezing spend wherever they can. For better or worse, companies are less sensitive to sustainability and employee morale issues until they hit their bottom line. As a result, I think that’s making some companies and industries bolder about pulling people back to the office.
These cost pressures, plus AI technologies, are likely to extend the more employer-friendly labor market we’re currently in as businesses look to augment the workers they are retaining rather than ramping up hiring efforts.
Given the suppressive effect on the job market, individual employees may be willing to sacrifice some of the flexibility that became an expectation during the pandemic in favor of stability and security. But I believe the underlying and root statements still hold true: Flexibility is a long-term shift in the future of work.
What is the biggest unsolved frustration you’re seeing in the future-of-work space right now?
Time is a company’s greatest resource. But in today’s workplaces — whether remote, in-office or hybrid — rarely does anyone take full responsibility for coordinating how individuals, teams or an entire company consumes time, which is all intricately networked together. The root cause is deeper: It’s cultural.
Shopify is a great example of this, having been in the news for canceling all recurring meetings. Many companies are eager to rethink their meeting culture; yet, meetings are a “tragedy of the commons” problem.
But this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Canceling recurring meetings doesn’t inherently transform how a company thinks about time; this shift must stem from a change in company-wide culture. Without that shift, I can promise one thing with complete certainty: The meetings will come back, and they’ll come back in the same disorganized and uncoordinated manner they began.
The reality is that time is a shared resource, and time management is a shared endeavor. The true solution lies in executive ownership. Until a company designates someone at the leadership level who is accountable for transforming the org-wide culture around time, businesses will continue to see a bottoms-up approach to meetings, characterized by wasted hours, frustrated employees and a lack of strategy.
One of the big shifts we’ve seen in this space is toward remote work. In your mind, what are the biggest benefits and challenges to enabling employees to work from home?
The pandemic supercharged the conversation about location flexibility, and we’ve learned that many teams are happier and more productive working from home compared to in the office. The flexibility of not having to commute and being able to take your dog out — those are meaningful productivity boosts if harnessed in the right way, and a meaningful competitive edge in the job market. Plus, remote work widens a company’s talent pool considerably and may also substantially lower salary costs.
When it comes to the workday and our schedules, the set of preferences and constraints that we each have are many and often unknown to others. Going remote introduced even more of these, around how and when people, teams and organizations work together. Companies that were not set up for remote work pre-pandemic are now fully embracing remote and hybrid environments, but as the complexity of our workday increases, our tools need to match that. Thankfully, the breakthrough of AI and LLMs is well-timed to help overcome complexity and enable more flexible work.
Another challenge of remote work is balancing the increased employee flexibility with employer productivity paranoia: the fear that employees are not leveraging that flexibility to increase productivity, but to do less. The pandemic forced employers to enable much greater employee agency because there was literally no other choice: Go remote or close up shop. Many of those companies found success and were able to increase productivity while empowering employees, but that success hasn’t been universal and is being particularly challenged in today’s macroeconomic environment.
There’s a trade-off point that every organization has to reach that balances employee agency with the mechanisms — be they procedural, cultural or technological — to motivate employee performance. As many businesses transition to hybrid models or implement full returns to the office, some of that agency workers came to expect will be taken away as a new balance is struck. This will be a tough challenge to overcome, and I think the companies that will be successful in managing this change will be the ones that honor employees’ work preferences in ways that enable them to feel deeply engaged on a day-to-day basis.
Some jobs are harder to do remotely, especially if large machines are involved (medical scanning, manufacturing, building, etc). What shifts, if any, are you seeing for roles that cannot be completed remotely?
Some jobs will always need to be done in person; there’s just no way around it. But a shift we’re seeing is that even on-site jobs with physical constraints are becoming more flexible and more driven by cost efficiencies. For roles that support office operations, for example, it’s probably not necessary to be physically present for a full 40-hour workweek. Individuals in these roles can come into the office a few days per week to perform essential tasks like running tests. The remaining days can be spent remotely, focusing on tasks like analyzing data, completing paperwork, or other projects that don’t require being in the office. That said, technology that enables work to be done remotely may be a limiting factor for these industries.
Across industries, we’re seeing more intentionality around how time is spent in person. Companies are identifying opportunities to either automate away inefficiencies or better maximize the time spent in the office to purposefully utilize the tools and resources that are there. Everything else will be done remotely, automated away, or will no longer be a requirement of the job.
One of the recurring themes around remote work is company culture and the related challenges of a fully remote onboarding process. The office has often played a major role on that front: How do you see this challenge being overcome?
For fully remote companies, the implication is that onboarding cannot be done well remotely. That, I think, is wrong. Beyond the critical basics — things like how we talk about the company, how we operate, who to go to for what, etc. — remote companies have to be intentional with how they bring humanity and personal connection into onboarding.
Onboarding should be a mutual introduction. How you show up with your company is a really important piece of it, but how you go about enabling new employees to show up fully as themselves is a huge piece in creating an environment for explicit and implicit learning.
In lieu of the organic watercooler chat and first-day lunches, the explicit elements are things like scheduling coffee chats and facilitating introductions that mimic more of the organic exchanges that happen in an office environment. The aim here is to manufacture an environment for new hires to share more about themselves and establish relationships across the team.
The implicit things are all the things that, if you were in an office, you would start to observe about a new hire’s preferences and the way they operate. Things like how to best communicate, what their working style is, and how they prefer to receive feedback. In remote cultures, these implicit learnings can be much more difficult to glean. It’s one of the reasons why we built Clockwise to allow people to implicitly define standards of how they personally like to work and enable them to honor their colleagues’ preferences.
All that said, even in remote environments, for cultural and connectivity reasons it’s critical to get people together in person on a cadence. There’s nothing better for relationship building than meeting face-to-face.
Mandy Price, co-founder and CEO, Kanarys
The pandemic made thinking about “future of work” a lot more urgent. What were the biggest things you’ve seen shift in the past three years? Did any of those shifts surprise you?
I’ve seen a major shift in how organizations view and prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Since the pandemic, we saw more companies invest in DEIB [diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging] initiatives and use data to identify gaps and measure progress.
During the Great Resignation and tight labor market, companies discovered that DEIB is a priority for young talent and underrepresented employees, making it critical in talent recruitment and retention. This shift was surprising to me because it took a pandemic to bring attention to an issue that should have been addressed long ago.
What is the biggest unsolved frustration you’re seeing in the future-of-work space right now?
For a DEIB program to succeed, leadership must be committed to implementation from start to finish. They must create an implementation plan that is complete with specific indicators of success, team touch points and more. Without clear goals and appropriate indicators that help assess your efforts, it won’t be possible to know whether or not progress is being made.
This points to another frustration: the lack of advancement of women and underrepresented employees. Unfortunately, pay gaps and differences in career opportunities between men and women as well as underrepresented employees continue. While pay transparency is intended to level the playing field, women won’t reach pay equity with men until 2056, and it’s even longer for people of color.
The lack of mental health support in the workplace is a recurring and growing frustration. The blurred boundaries between work and personal life in remote work setups can lead to challenges in maintaining a healthy work-life balance, which can affect mental well-being. Addressing the well-being and mental health needs of employees in the digital workspace is an ongoing concern, and it extends to the growing need for caregivers
One of the big shifts we’ve seen in this space is toward remote work. In your mind, what are the biggest benefits and challenges to enabling employees to work from home?
Remote work has the potential to create a more flexible work environment that accommodates the needs of working parents and caregivers. This is especially important given the rising cost of childcare and the growing number of caregivers in the workforce. By allowing employees to work remotely, companies create a more family-friendly work culture, helping retain valuable employees who might otherwise be forced to leave the workforce due to the demands of caregiving responsibilities.
Another important aspect of remote work is its potential to drive disability inclusion. For employees with disabilities, remote work can provide a range of benefits that may not be available in a traditional on-site work environment.
Lastly, remote work eliminates geographical constraints, enabling companies to tap into a broader talent pool. By removing the need for employees to be physically present in a specific location, organizations can attract and hire skilled professionals from anywhere in the world. This expanded access to talent increases diversity, brings in fresh perspectives, and fosters a global mindset within teams.
Remote and hybrid models can create subtle inequities between employees who are in the office and those who aren’t. For example, remote workers may be treated less favorably, miss out on mentorship opportunities, and be less engaged with their team, which could lead to fewer advancement opportunities. It’s important that companies be more intentional about tracking promotions, pay scales and opportunities between employees who are remote and those in the office in order to uncover any disproportionate effects of being in the office or not. Otherwise, the unfortunate outcome will be disparities among these two groups, and remote employees being penalized for not being in the office.
Some jobs are harder to do remotely, especially if large machines are involved (medical scanning, manufacturing, building, etc). What shifts, if any, are you seeing for roles that cannot be completed remotely?
While the shift to remote work has been more feasible for certain workers, such as knowledge-based roles, there are some noteworthy shifts happening for roles that cannot be completed remotely. One example is hybrid work models. This approach provides flexibility and more work-life balance while ensuring that critical tasks are carried out in person.
As with hybrid work models, employers are exploring flexible scheduling options to accommodate workers whether they’re working in the office or remotely. This can include staggered shifts, adjusted work hours, or modified work arrangements to minimize the number of people onsite at any given time.
Training and upskilling have often been overlooked and underappreciated by organizations. However, today’s workforce is looking for more purpose in their professional lives and proactively seeking out organizations that can satisfy those needs. This has helped the workforce adapt to changing work requirements, leverage technology effectively, and navigate the evolving demands of their roles regardless of where they’re located.
Another example of the shift in non-remote roles is technology integration. During the pandemic, the use of videoconferencing and messaging overcame many of the hurdles that came with the adoption of technology tools. Remote monitoring and control systems, robotics and automation are being leveraged to perform certain tasks remotely or with minimal human intervention, reducing the need for constant on-site presence.
One of the recurring themes around remote work is company culture and the related challenges of a fully remote onboarding process. The office has often played a major role on that front: How do you see this challenge being overcome?
To help build company culture for their remote workforce, companies can set up channels for regular communication for all employees. At Kanarys, we’re a fully remote team, and we have channels on Teams devoted to family and home life to keep our employees connected and mirror those “watercooler” moments.
It’s also critical to ask employees what support they need even though they’re working remotely. Company leadership should conduct a regular survey to establish a continuous feedback loop so they can make any necessary changes. These surveys should be kept anonymous so employees feel like they can share freely without fear of retaliation.