What has remote work taught us and what does the future hold for us as an agile team?

Have you ever wondered what remote work has taught us? Well, if you have, it’s something that Matthew M.F. Miller has been working on researching to answer this question and give us a glimpse into the future of it.  

 First, we should start by saying that remote work in this pandemic, originated precisely because of the need for isolation, i.e., it was not a conscious decision, which has caused that between 2020 and 2021 many of these workers will feel burned out.  

 Burnout is a point against remote work because it indicates that it has not been taken or planned to the advantage of the collaborators but to the advantage of the companies and this is not the right way.  

 Chris Herd, founder of Firstbase, a platform for remote work, says that the move to remote work during the pandemic was executed amid the rush and coupled with home life, causing people in the midst of the boredom of not being able to go out, prefer to work more and resulting in burnout and the false belief that remote work is not functional.  

 For this reason, Herd decided to talk to about 2000 companies to foresee the future of remote work and has assessed that for those who have not enjoyed it, the best is yet to come, since strategies are coming to make this modality, a permanent one.  

 Tools such as Firstbase, Slack, Zoom will be key to this, in fact, 52% of workers have said they do not want to return to the way of working before and prefer to continue doing it remotely and considering that the pandemic restrictions have already been lifting, this will become the most successful reality.  

So, despite the negativity and some, the most important lesson is to be able to divide work, home and personal life through strategies that are already a reality.  

 The future will be different, as companies understand that it is better to spend on equipment and give their employees what they need to work at home than to have to buy furniture, rent or build space for them. This will also give companies the advantage of being able to acquire talent anywhere in the world, thus ensuring the best personnel, competitiveness, and cost reduction.  

 The hybrid option, he warns, may be the worst of the strategies. According to a Gartner survey, 82% of leaders want to offer this option to their employees, for example Citigroup and Ford are already implementing this strategy. He says that this can cause an exclusion of employees who are 100% remote and impede professional growth and therefore limit the option to hire the best talent by preferring to hire whoever is available.  

 Remote work makes people more focused and better able to divide their time, delivering their best at work and in their personal lives. What a company needs are to define Kpi’s, Okr’s, follow up and not focus on a work schedule.  

 This process is difficult for bureaucratic companies, but it has been proven, with companies like Stripe, who have been remote since their inception, that focusing on productivity is the path to success.  

 With all this we have seen, the main teaching is the shift of thinking towards productivity and not working time. At Scrummers we believe 100% in this idea and that is why we are proud of our talent, and we are sure that the strategies we will implement in the future are based on everything we have learned in this time and continue to grow. 

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