Kicking off the week with a link to a Protocol article about hybrid work software. While the piece focuses on the push around Teams, Slack, and Zoom, here’s the numbers I want to pull out.
The amount of workers operating remotely full-time decreased from 54% in May 2020 to 25% in September 2021, per Gallup, while the portion of individuals that went into the office occasionally grew from 15% to 20%.
It’s a longer exploration of changes to work, including four-day workweeks and asynchronous communications.
There’s clearly money here. Dropbox beat Q3 estimates – why? Remote work.
Then again, that’s software — 69% of respondents to an Enboarder survey said they “don’t feel a very strong sense of connection” to their co-workers. Enboarder surveyed 2,000 full-time employees for the report.
Almost three-quarters of respondents said collaboration requires much more effort now than it did prior to March 2020, according to the Nov. 1 results.
Why do we care?
There is certainly money in the software around delivering remote work, which is where most of the rest of the press coverage is. I’ll continue to note I think there’s even more opportunity in making these products actually effective.
My analysis is that the end states are not at all understood, so don’t read too much into the raw data on who is working where.. and instead worry about the ways to help orgs with that sense of connection or reduce collaboration effort. And the answer won’t be just returning to the old ways, as we have stat after stat talking about how employees like a lot of what they picked up.
This middle bit – not all remote, not all together – is HARD, but hard things have opportunity. This remains not a technology problem, but a people one to address.