by Raghu Nandhan | Feb 4, 2022 | Ace the Interview, Company Insights, Virtual recruiter
With the outbreak of COVID-19 globally, companies have started focusing on remote working rather than conducting traditional business operations. Why? Because health is as important as work is. If the employees feel sick, then there’s no chance of succeeding. Hence, the most feasible decision today is to prioritize providing homework to your clients.
Many businesses have already provided their employees with permanent work from home like it’s their responsibility to focus on public health in such tough times. However, as COVID-19 has hit the world suddenly, it was not easy to switch to remote working. Several factors need to be considered and in such a short period, everyone was in a fix to understand how remote working can be done. Of course, there are many challenges, but then there was no other chance.
Many companies rendered their employees redundant and with this many people have gone unemployed.
Well, now that the situation is under control, companies have started calling their employees to the office. But most of the employees are still demanding work from home as they neither want to risk their life nor their family’s health. Now that they have become familiar with work from the scenario, they are demanding remote work flexibility from their employers.
Are they demanding right?
Today, in this blog we will be guiding you about it in detail.
Why Say ‘A Yes’ to wfh flexible
There are many reasons why work from home proves to be more beneficial than traditional office jobs. Let’s glance at some of the benefits of working from home below:
- Helps to maintain work-life balance
It is very much true. In-office job, you travel long distances and don’t get any time left for the family. Work from home is flexible and helps you to maintain a balance between your personal life and professional life. Travel time is set to ‘nil’ and that is the time you can enjoy with your family and relish every moment, every day.
Also, one main advantage of remote working is that you get flexible schedules. No boss is standing on your head for work with a controlling attitude and hence you can easily work at your time frame.
Suppose you have an average commute time of around 1.5-2 hours daily which will be entirely laid off when you are working from home. This time can be utilized to do other productive things like reading books, cooking, spending time with family, and so on.
Do you know that more than 30-40 minutes of daily commuting can lead you to stress? Well, it is true and hence working from home will keep this in check.
People who are working remotely are not just saving their money but also their energy. Money is saved in many ways like commute fares, parking expenses, petrol or diesel expenses, and lunches bought, etc.
Many companies have allowed their employees to work from home and they are doing it for the good of them and their company’s success too. This way, they are going to save too much money for the long term.
- Peaceful working environment
Do you also feel stuck and blank in between work if a noisy environment comes around you in the office? Well, in work from home, you will not lose momentum and rhythm while working. A good and peaceful environment at the workplace helps you to maintain your workflow and this way you will be much more productive than you are in your office.
Adapting to the “New Normal”
Our lives have completely turned upside down with the advent of COVID-19. Work from home has become our new friend and at the same time, this trend seems irreversible. Working from home provides you more flexibility and reduces your everyday struggle to a great extent. If you haven’t experienced work from home, you are now going to do it. Trust us, you will love it. Although you are going to miss your colleagues, those lunch breaks, and chit-chats in between the work change is the rule of life and hence you must always be ready to experience life changes.
Work from home will not be so strict to you. You can work easily at your time frames from your home and rest you can enjoy with your family. It’s more like freelancing.
Always keep in mind to set a clear boundary between your work-life when you are working virtually. Don’t let your work suffer because it can danger your job thereafter. Just keep doing your work and find some suitable place in your home, away from distractions.
But yes, whenever you are having breaks, make the most out of them. Enjoy it with your family, play with your kids or even spend it with yourself.
Ideally, the “new normal” is here to stay with us for the latest one or two years in our life so instead of feeling sad, try to make things interesting. This way you will be more pro-activated towards your work-life.
Work from home: Good for employers too!
Pandemic has made businesses experience how working from home looks like. For many, it is like the toughest thing but for some, it went smoothly.
Work from home has brought some advantages for employers too. Want to know what they are? Scroll down!
Along with staff being benefited from work from home, employers are also witnessing the same. No rent, building maintenance, equipment, furniture, tea, or coffee costs have to be paid and hence these are their savings too.
For instance, if the weather is a bit unfavorable, then the employees often take work from home or remain on-off. But this is not the case in permanent work from home.
A new way forward!
Although work from home has been a catalyst for many employees out there, people are demanding permanent work from home from their employees. But is it right to ask for it as it has been a long time now since everyone is working virtually? Hence to stay active, fit, and maintain a social life, it is essential to switch to a traditional office job now.
However, seeing the situation is under control these days, companies can give alternate day solutions to their employees. That means one day work from home and one day work from the office. This will be an ideal solution going forward.
Persisting work from home culture
After the COVID-19 went crazy across the globe, companies had offered work from home to their employees, but now as the situation is normalizing, they are focusing on coming back to the office and resuming the work from there. Well, the percentage of employees who want to work from the office again is much lower than the ones who want to work from the office. It is almost 30% of employees who seriously want to resume work from the office.
The Bottom Line
In a nutshell, the situation in 2021 is not as worse as it was in 2020. However, we also can’t say that it is back to normal. The correct thing which can be said here is that the situation is getting better day by day. So, it’s a 50-50 say. If the company’s work is getting hampered, then there’s no harm in switching back to work from the office. However, if you as a company can easily work from home, you can stay home with your remote team, safe.
Pragna Solutions has been an active recruiter over the past many years. There has been increased remote job posting since 2019. Not only the employees but the employers are welcoming remote work culture as well.
by Raghu Nandhan | Oct 11, 2021 | Art of Recruiting, Industry Trends, Virtual recruiter
Nothing could have prepared your staffing firm for 2020, but happily, that isn’t the case as we head into the second half of 2022. Bullhorn polled hundreds of staffing professionals before the start of 2020 and again during the COVID-19 crisis to learn about the industry’s outlooks, objectives, problems, and staffing patterns. Are your goals and difficulties in line with those of your colleagues? Are there any areas where you can set yourself apart from the competition or where you need to improve?
Here are some personnel trends to consider for 2022 as you make decisions regarding your company’s future:
Professionals in the field of staffing and recruiting are hopeful about the future.
Staffing firms had a difficult year in 2020, with layoffs and business closures, but respondents are generally hopeful about 2022. In the Survey, the majority of respondents predicted that the economy and business performance will improve in the second half of 2020.
While the staffing industry as a whole has struggled throughout the pandemic, a full 30% of respondents stated company performance has increased or remained the same since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis compared to Q2 of 2019.
Even when you take into account that many businesses have weathered the storm, there is no correlation between current business performance and future forecasts. For example, respondents at staffing firms that saw their performance improve and those that suffered a decline of more than 30% agreed on when the economy would revive – slightly more than half predicted it will happen in the last six months of 2020.
The bottom line is that employment firms are expecting big things in 2022, so don’t expect competition to ease up anytime soon. Invest intelligently to provide the finest possible experience to applicants and clients; your competitors will undoubtedly do likewise.
Clients are the most important thing to us.
The employment market has always been about relationships, but this year the emphasis has switched on which partnerships firms value. Candidate acquisition was a top priority in 2020, as it was in 2019 and 2018. This was mostly (but not entirely) due to talent scarcity, which is the ultimate difficulty for staffing agencies.
However, since the unemployment rate bounced from record lows to record highs throughout COVID-19, a talent shortage is no longer the issue it was at the start of the year. Instead, as businesses battle to acquire new clients and retain existing clients in a changing market, client relationships (the number-two goal coming into 2020) are now firmly the top priority for organizations.
That isn’t to argue that candidates aren’t important. Since the COVID-19 crisis, firms’ second-most essential priority has remained enhancing candidate engagement and experience, ahead of other important priorities such as managing cash flow. Finally, in this environment and any other, focusing on connections is still a winning business strategy.
DEI is a business requirement.
The staffing business, like the rest of the workforce, has always experienced issues relating to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and 2022 will be no different. According to one Data survey, only 28% of companies have a person of color in any leadership position (and of those, only 5 percent are women of color). Furthermore, although accounting for nearly double the number of workforce practitioners, only 16 percent of all leaders in the business are persons of color (30 percent).
In 2020 and 2021, one thing that has changed is the global attention on inequality and inequity. As a result, staffing and recruiting firms are taking steps to address the industry’s DEI concerns. One thing to remember is that adopting DEI into the workplace is not only the correct thing to do; it is also good for business. Two-thirds of staffing experts believe that diverse companies are more effective than their homologs.
Work from home is here to stay.
Many agencies functioned remotely before COVID-19, but it wasn’t common practice in the industry. The epidemic, of course, requires distant recruiting and the use of remote technology: since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, 91% of staffing professionals have adopted (or increased their use of) video interviewing or video conferencing solutions.
However, don’t expect remote employment or technology to disappear once the epidemic is no longer a requirement. Most staffing professionals, on the other hand, believe that the surge in remote jobs and remote recruiting will be permanent after COVID-19. Most of the positions we used to recruit for were office-based, but that is no longer the case. Even those in charge of large teams work from home.
COVID-19 could hasten the introduction of automation and artificial intelligence, particularly in work environments where people are in close contact.
Businesses have traditionally regulated costs and reduced uncertainty during recessions by embracing automation and revamping work processes, both of which diminish the share of positions comprising primarily regular tasks. By June 2020, China’s robots production had surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
To minimize workplace density and cope with surges in demand, many organizations implemented automation and AI in warehouses, grocery shops, call centers, and manufacturing plants. The association between high scores on physical proximity and automation use cases is a common feature of these automation use cases, and our research suggests that work environments with high levels of human engagement are likely to see the fastest adoption of automation and AI.
The mix of jobs may vary, with low-wage occupations seeing limited growth.
COVID-19-accelerated trends may result in more changes in the mix of jobs within economies than we anticipated before the pandemic.
We discovered that following the pandemic, a significantly different mix of jobs may develop in each of the eight economies. We predict the pandemic to have the most negative impact on workers in foodservice and customer sales and service roles, as well as less-skilled office support roles, compared to our pre-COVID-19 estimates. Although the expansion of e-commerce and the delivery economy may result in more jobs in warehousing and transportation, these gains are unlikely to compensate for the loss of many low-wage positions.
For example, in the United States, customer service and food service occupations may decline by 4.3 million, but transportation jobs may increase by over 800,000. Healthcare and STEM vocations may see higher demand than before the pandemic, reflecting increased concern to health as populations age and incomes rise, as well as growing demand for professionals who can invent, implement, and maintain new technology.
Productivity vs. Remote Work
10,000 employees polled by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics stated they were equally as productive working from home as they were in the office.
In fact, 30 percent of those polled said that working from home made them more productive and engaged.
From the middle of March to the middle of September 2020, the same survey team determined that commute time was decreased by 62.4 million hours per day, resulting in a total time savings of over 9 billion hours.
Conclusion
Before the pandemic, net employment losses were concentrated in middle-wage manufacturing and some office work, owing to automation, while low- and high-wage jobs grew. Almost all low-wage people who lost their jobs could shift into other low-wage jobs, such as retail or home healthcare. We now expect that practically all growth in labor demand will occur in high-wage jobs due to the pandemic’s impact on low-wage jobs. To avoid job loss, Low-wage workers are expected to transition to higher-wage jobs that can only be acquired with different skills.
Pragna solutions has been an active recruiter before and amidst different stages of the pandemic. There has been subsequent increase of remote job post since 2019. In fact, most companies are promising permanent remote jobs. Therefore, it won’t be wrong to infer that remote job is the irreversible reality that will exist even after the pandemic ceases. Similarly, remote recruiting has adapted to the transformation. Pragna solution provides AI enabled recruitment solution so that our clients can harness the power of job board even if it is for remote jobs.
