“If your staff has been working at home for more than a year, there’s no compelling reason to bring them back into an office.”
Productivity has suffered from being out of the office.
Rich people traditionally lived on high ground. Why? To keep better track of their workforce.
Here I was thinking that it was because: (1) sewage runs downhill, and (2) higher elevations flood last. :-)
Productivity has suffered from being out of the office.
I have yet to see any definitive study that has determined this conclusively. I suspect there's a high degree of variation among industries for this. And a lot of it is based on how productivity is measured. A person working from home may complete less work in a defined period of time (hour, day, week, etc.) than one in the office, but I'll bet that any industry that could function for six weeks or longer with most of their staff working from home has found that these staff are far more productive when measured by the overhead costs of the company.
Any CEO with half a brain is surely looking at a laundry list of COST efficiencies that can be permanently established if most office staff are working from home.
1. Employees save a ton of commuting time and expense (at least in major cities).
2. Workers Compensation Insurance premiums will almost certainly be lower.
3. #MeToo issues will practically disappear. Heck, the HR department can be shrunk to 10% of its previous size.
4. Many employees will place a high value on the flexibility of their schedules that comes with working from home. The most remarkable example I can think of comes from one of my own clients. I've been working closely with him for more than a year now, and we have web meetings at least 2-3 times in an average week. Six months ago he moved to a small town 75 miles away from the city where his employer is located ... and I just learned about it last week. LOL.