The Future of Work
While many businesses are still coming to terms with the fact that remote work is the current reality due to COVID-19, many enterprises were already making this transition long before isolation and distancing restrictions were implemented. For example, the Seattle tech giant Amazon was already letting employees decide on whether or not to work from home before COVID-19 and has now extended this until October.
Google also announced early this year that many employees would continue to work from home until the end of the year, and this may trickle into 2021.
Allowing employees to work from home—what was once considered a perk for senior employees—is now a lifeline for countless companies hoping to keep their operations running amid COVID-19.
“Every company has had discussions around the question, ‘Could our company operate more remotely?’” says CEO of Stormboard, Reg Cheramy. “And then a worldwide crisis like this hits, and they're forced to go remote 100 percent across the whole board. They had no choice, they had to shut down their offices.”
This massive market shift—that continues to evolve every day—is now making finance leaders and enterprise CEOs come to terms with the benefits of going remote, perhaps changing their mindset on how to run their businesses in the future.
“I think from a remote work perspective, COVID has accelerated the transition in a massive way,” Cheramy says, “There's no one event that could have made remote work transition faster than this. Every company always thought, ‘Oh, we should have more people working from home. There are so many benefits to remote work. Lower real estate requirements, happier employees… less commuting to work.”
Some companies have even declared that they are planning a permanent shift to remote work even after the public health crisis is over. In a survey collected by Gartner, a research and advisory firm, 317 companies said they plan “to move at least five percent of their workforce to a remote schedule,” reported Forbes.
“We’re talking to one major company right now, and they're not going to open 60 percent of their offices after this is over,” Cheramy says. “This accounts for about 25 percent of their real estate. There is a massive market shift happening here that couldn’t have happened any other way.”
Companies are now taking the money saved by having employees work from home and reinvesting it in novel ways to ultimately create a better company and help their employees build professional and comfortable remote workspaces.
“If you can have a fancy chair at the office, why not at home? And why wouldn't a company pay for it? We are working with one company that is talking about getting all their people iPads so that they can do more whiteboarding in a remote session,” Cheramy says.
Still, while going remote opens its fair share of benefits for enterprise businesses, Cheramy wants to point out that there are indeed some cons. One is that while going remote can open up doors for employees from different regions, a professional harmony between distributed teams can be affected due to different time zones.
“You may be able to find a fantastic programmer in a country that you’ve never hired from before. So there’s more talent to choose from and, depending on the market, you might get a savings based on the labor cost in different regions. But, how do you communicate with synchronicity if you are working in a region that's completely opposite your time zone?” he says. “If we’re never online together, how do we communicate? How do we collaborate in an effective way that mitigates both distance and time?”
It’s a complication that will have to be ironed out as this transition becomes more normal, and Cheramy believes every company will have a different solution.
Some companies are also switching to a remote work hybrid model that has employees only coming into the office a few times a week.
“So you might come in on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I might come in on Tuesday, Thursday, so that we were leaving space or leaving room in the office for social distancing,” Cheramy says.
Another option companies are looking towards is visual collaboration software, and this is fantastic news for Stormboard, whose purpose is to provide a digital workspace where remote teams can hold meetings, run brainstorming sessions, and have virtual visual collaboration.
“It's an amazing time for us, because we no longer have to help companies find a budget for Stormboard,” Cheramy says. “Their budget is now all of the money they're saving by shutting down real estate.
He equates this shift to visual collaboration software with the appearance of WebEx, a software company that specializes in video conferencing and web conferencing, that exploded around its 2007 inception.
“WebEx started the whole audio-video collaboration thing, and the sale there was that you’re going to save time and money on travel by holding your meetings remotely. That created a whole multi-billion dollar industry of audio-video collaboration,” Cheramy says. “No one knew they needed WebEx right until that market kind of evolved into building it out, and now every single company has something like WebEx. The same thing is going to happen with visual collaboration.”
Over the last few months, Cheramy says Stormboard has not only seen massive growth in the volume of clients using the product, but also the size of a company’s virtual remote team.
“It's 20 to 30 to 50 to two hundred people exploring this together,” he says. “Then there are more broad discussions with large companies saying, ‘How can we implement this across our entire organization instead of starting with just a few users.’ Normally, integrating a tool like Stormboard company-wide would take a lot more time and energy to make happen.”
Cheramy has been somewhat of a pioneer for visual collaboration software and has always envisioned this shift occurring with or without a global pandemic.
“About a year ago, I told my team that in the next five years every Fortune 500 Company would have a visual collaboration tool like Stormboard. My claim is coming true far sooner than I thought, because every company is now realizing that they need to find a way to work visually remotely,” he says.
It’s safe to say that Cheramy is ecstatic to watch companies try out these new remote work models.
“This transition to trying out remote tools and remote work, whether a company was forced to try it out or not, is going to change how companies around the world operate, and how employees engage with and enjoy their work,” he says. “There's a massive opportunity for companies to rethink some of the things that they've always assumed to be true, and really embrace a new normal when it comes to working remotely.”
About the Author
Stephan Boissonneault is a freelance writer, editor, and photographer. His work has been seen in publications such as Avenue, Vue Weekly, Edmonton Journal, Disruption, Now Toronto, etc. He also plays music every now and then.
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