Companies large and small have spent the past several months experimenting with different work models to identify the best arrangement for their organization.
While some businesses have taken part of their workforce remote, certain workers have been required to stay on-site at least some of the time. This distinction has revealed much about how work is done, which arrangements produce the best work, and the inequities that can come from traditional ways of working.
This transition has led leaders to reevaluate how performance is measured. Is it time spent in the workplace? Or is it the quality of work produced?
Shifting to remote work at the beginning of the pandemic meant more than just allowing employees to work from home — it meant reassessing managerial responsibilities altogether.
Finding the best methods to keep teams engaged and collaborating may have been one of the biggest challenges. Time has taught leaders that in-person collaboration actually allowed workers who did not contribute much to reap the rewards of projects.
Remote working technologies forced managers to have a deeper understanding of how work was getting done, with tools and resources allowing them to keep track of who was contributing and how much.
Simultaneously, leaders also found that workers who were more introverted in person have become more outspoken in virtual meetings due to not feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by more extroverted colleagues.
Productivity in general has also seen an upswing thanks to remote working allowing people to have more time for creative thinking and focus on deeper work.
