Four Major Shifts to Work Life During COVID-19

Given the radical shift the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the global social and economic landscapes during the past year, it is no wonder it has also spurred dramatic shifts in the ways employees and employers alike think of their time at the office. Even the standards for what an “office” looks like have expanded to include the realm of remote work, driving many of the shifts we evaluate below. Priorities are changing and with them are the ways we work, especially with regard to where our values lay. Understanding several of these changes can help us remain effective at our jobs and adjust to the changing landscape of office work around them. 

1.    What “work-life” balance looks like

 Earlier this year, when most of the country endured a temporary economic shutdown, the majority of office workers found themselves working from home, scrambling to preserve some scrap of normalcy while trying to attend meetings and conferences from the comfort of their kitchen table. As a result, one of the greatest challenge has been devising a way to preserve a division between work and the rest of life when the two happen within the exact same square footage—childcare, paperwork, dirty dishes, and virtual meetings all blend together, challenging an employee’s productivity and their wellbeing. 

 Employees and leadership alike have been forced to devise a litany of ways to reconstruct a boundary between “work” and “life.” While advice varies, approximating the schedule of in-person office work when done remotely has proven successful, as has the overall reevaluation of how employees choose to spend their time. Many find that an extra hour of time off during the day markedly increases their productivity and wellbeing, so long as they learn to strike a balance. 

2.    New standards of productivity

One of the most individualistic changes that employees have seen in light of the pandemic are the enormously different standards for their productivity at work, arising from their own degree of motivation and administrative encouragement to become more or less productive depending on company decision making. In short, productivity has turned into a balancing act for most office leadership as they are faced with the economic effects of COVID-19 and witness the personal effects on their workforce. In some cases, greater leniency is the key to ensuring employees do not get burnt out and can maintain consistent productivity levels even as the world changes around them, but for others increasing encouragement is much more effective. At the end of the day, a change in what traditional efficiency looks like means that office leadership will be much more flexible in meeting the needs of their employees, even if it comes at the expense of a small amount of productivity. Companies are becoming much more concerned with the long-term growth of their company so investing time in the comfort and happiness of employees can be a strategic choice in the long run.

3.    Remote company culture

When most office employees agree to work for a single organization, one of the final factors they tend to consider is the “company culture”, which captures the various ways coworkers interact with one another and how leadership tends to interact with their staff. A conventionally good “company culture” tends to include positive relationships and friendships between coworkers and top-down relationships that cultivate trust, growth, and productivity. An immense challenge for office leadership has been devising ways to preserve company culture and recruit new employees into it in a new socially distant work environment. 

 While there is no one perfect answer, many employers have found that allotting time for casual conversation between coworkers is immensely successful in preserving peer-to-peer connections. With regard to remote leadership, relationships are largely dependent on the particular nature of an employee which can require a bit of trial and error to perfectly determine. For example, some employees report that the most positive remote work experience is when their boss is hands off, whereas others prefer an increased amount of communication to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction. In general, taking the time to personalize each line of communication is the perfect formula for sustaining a positive company culture.

4.    Emphasis on self-care

 The most common non-viral symptom of the pandemic by far is stress. Workers of all walks of life are facing unprecedented levels of stress as a result of all the ways our life has been drastically remodeled and restructured. Thus, one of the roles of an employer has become to provide an outlet for that stress through self-care. Employees who are given the time to practice a variety of self-care during the work week show stronger feelings of warmth toward their employers and there is longstanding evidence of the correlation between positive mental health and productivity at work. As greater and greater numbers of companies embrace the power of self-care, one of the greatest challenges remains convincing employees of its effectiveness and implementing activities that manage to feel genuine rather than forced. 

With a growing movement in support of self-care comes the increased availability of resources. Many employers have found that merely supplying their employees with the necessary tools and information they need to practice effective self-care has proven to be the most effective way to encourage workers to actually evaluate their mental health. Other key measures include promoting social activities between employees to relieve the effects of loneliness and create feelings of camaraderie that is lost due to the isolation of the pandemic. 

Thanks to the development toward a virtual workspace that started years ago, AITHERAS did not have to make many changes in light of the pandemic. AITHERAS has been moving toward the cloud and automation space for years. For example, while we have about 50 staff and consultants, there may only be 4–5 people in the office at one time. 

Due to the virtual meeting and communications that AITHERAS already had set in place before the pandemic hit, we had a great advantage. The effect was small, and the company was able to respond quickly to the evolving world, even able to make strides as a business in the middle of a pandemic.

As we experiment with bringing our employees back to the office, now is the time to ensure that your workplace is both safe and productive. Use this moment to implement a virtual workspace that gives your employees the freedom to work from home even after the pandemic. Build better experiences for your staff which will improve their mental health, as well as create a positive workplace culture and increases productivity.