It’s the start of Summer and many countries around the world are opening up after a lockdown ridden start to 2021. Despite more and more people returning to offices, the vast majority are either WFH fully or working in a hybrid model. So what’s been the main talking points and WFH news for June? We’ve rounded things up below:
First up is a topic that is very important to working from home: Productivity! Some simple but valuable advice on How to Stay Motivated When Working from Home. A lot of this we’ve covered in our guide on working from home. Something significant that we picked up is “According to the ONS, in 2020, people who worked from home did an average of 6 hours of unpaid overtime every week, compared with people who didn’t who worked 3.6“. We can see how knowing this will help readers realise the importance of Setting Boundaries between your personal and work lives. Staying on the productivity topic, there was also an interesting article on Bloomberg on how ‘Your Boss Doesn’t Buy You’re More Productive WFH‘.
Now onto something more inspirational. Before the pandemic and mainstream WFH trend would you have thought of a billion dollar company without an office? In an interview with Johnny Boufarhat, the BBC CEO Secrets series presented how his company employs 650 people with no central office and that the company is fully remote! Read the whole article here. His personal story is inspirational in itself and hats off to him.
The concept of working from anywhere (WFA) is certainly very attractive, especially to employees. It can cause huge economic shifts and changes to people’s standard of living. For employers however there are practical implications and some sort of ‘intervention’ or monitoring is advisable. This article by the CEO of a startup talks about ‘Three Mistakes CEOs Make Letting Their Employees Work From Anywhere‘.
The legal situation of WFH is still somewhat in the air and the vast majority of employers are working out their long term policies whilst keeping things pretty fluid in the short term. In the UK, the heads of the UK’s largest business lobby group and two major City employers have warned against giving workers the legal right to demand remote working, claiming it would harm young employees and city centre economies. This sounds like scaremongering but you can make your own mind up by reading the full article here.
In a nutshell, the same sort of themes and discussion points – for most workers the future looks like adopting some sort of hybrid model (working some days in the office and some days in the office). The discussions will continue to go on…is WFH more productive? Is the office better for the young who are at the beginning of their careers? And so on. We’ll certainly keep you posted in our monthly round ups!
