A Pandemic’s Impact on Remote Work

With the COVID-19 virus continuing to spread, there is a potential for many teams and whole companies to have to quickly shift gears from working in HQs and globally distributed offices to working from home. This will impact the operations of both the companies handling this rapid scale in remote work and companies unaccustomed to a remote work culture. It will also impact personal and family life at a broader scale; creating new demand for services and products that cater to at-home workers.

• Remote-friendly software tools like Zoom, Slack, Hangouts, etc. must not only ensure their products can function at scale with lumpy spikes in both adoption and usage, but should also ensure their teams can handle the stress on the company — from sales and user onboarding to customer support and billing. Teams need to prepare for growth they’ve never experienced. This is a chance for these companies to shine, but they could also easily implode (for anyone buying up their stock!).
• If a company has not had a remote-friendly culture to-date, the shift will a big change — and could be sudden without time to prepare. HR and operations teams should start to get up to speed on trends and best practices for remote work, stat. This article has a great list of reads on the topic. Share with your managers and start talking about how you might operate if you have to shift to remote work for an extended period of time.
• Assuming the dust settles and we will get past this impending pandemic, once you’ve opened the door to adopting a remote work culture, it may be hard to go back. My prediction is that there will be a higher demand for more remote-friendly software solutions, more workers looking for remote roles, more need for co-working spaces outside of urban settings and a lot of empty space in large office parks and urban towers.
• In terms of personal and family lives, I could imagine even more demand for home delivery services, build-out of home offices and demand for in-home care givers. Those who have not traditionally worked from home will quickly realize that it’s not as simple as sitting at your laptop on your couch for the day. The new remote workforce will need private spaces away from family and life’s distractions (laundry, dishes, the dog!) in order to focus. They’ll need alternatives to daycare and possibly even need work spaces for children who cannot attend their schools for some period of time.

While there’s no need to panic (yet), it’s prudent to think about how the potential for a pandemic will impact our work and family life — beyond the worst possibility of ourselves and our loved ones actually getting the disease. Until then, be safe, get the facts straight, prepare for possibilities and PLEASE, if you are sick, stay home!