Following the successful adoption of remote working by most employees and organizations during the COVID pandemic, many have speculated how employees will want to work after the pandemic is over. We’ve seen organizations take bold steps to embrace working from home and distributed workforces. DocuSign, Twitter, REI, and others are ditching traditional office expectations and giving employees the option to work where and how they want.
The question remains, will employees want to continue working from home, transition back into an office environment, or some hybrid of the two? And when an employee is “WFH,” are they working where you think they are?
Do employees want to return to the office after the COVID-19 pandemic?
We took to Twitter users to see how employees are feeling about returning to work. Here’s what they had to say.
You can see that only a third of employees expect to return to the office when their employer reopens. A good quarter will continue working from home, and another quarter will split their time between the office and working from home. The last 18% or so are still determining where they will work once the pandemic is under control.
It’s not clear whether these responses are due to mandates from their employer. However, it looks like employees will want the flexibility and options to work both in an office and at home at first glance. What’s right for one employee might not be best for another.
Are your employees working where you think they are?
Whether an employee has enthusiastically or begrudgingly embraced working from home, the ability to work from anywhere is one that offers a lot of benefits and opportunities, but also some potential complications from a compliance perspective.
So where are your employees working?
According to this Twitter poll, almost half of the respondents work in the same city/location as their office, nearly 100% of the time. However, the other half of the respondents spend at least some time working in a different city/jurisdiction than their office. This could have implications in local taxes paid by a business.
To effectively take advantage of the “work from anywhere” new world of work, organizations need new tools to monitor their global employee footprint and manage compliance risk. Topia Compass is the leading business travel and distributed workforce compliance management solution. Learn how Topia compass can help your business leverage distributed workforces here.
In an upcoming blog post, we’ll look at additional poll data that highlights just how difficult it can be to know where your employees are working.
