Changing Times, Changing Workplaces
How does the shift to remote work impact your company’s evolving strategies for implementing effective drug testing policies for your remote employees?
- By Yvette Farnsworth Baker
- Mar 01, 2024
One of the biggest disruptions to the workplace in recent years was the seismic and almost instantaneous shift to working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. By June 2020, less than 30 percent of U.S. employees were working on their business premises. While at the time most people anticipated that changes would be temporary, after a few years of uncertainty one thing is clear: remote working will be a significant part of the future.
The Future of the Workplace
Recent years have alleviated some major concerns about working from home. For one, the vast majority of employers and employees have reported that productivity has not suffered. In a 2020 survey, 86 percent of respondents reported that they were fully productive while working from home. However, many executives still cite concerns about remote work productivity, and are implementing return-to-work policies for at least a few days a week. Additionally, 78 percent of office workers reported in the same survey that they had the resources they needed to work successfully from home, despite the fact that remote work sprang on most industries rather abruptly in 2020.
It is also clear that employees want to continue to work remotely into the future. Seventy-six percent of respondents in the above-cited survey want to work from home a few days per week. Similarly, 89 percent of executives believe that most or many employees will work from home at least one day per week on a permanent basis.
Companies are taking notice of the shift and its long-term ramifications. At the end of 2020, 87 percent of executives planned to make changes to their company’s real estate portfolio in 2021. In one example, retailer REI announced that it would sell its brand new, unused corporate campus in Washington, so that the company could “lean into remote working as an engrained, supported, and normalized model.” As of September 2023, average office occupancy rate in the top 10 cities in the U.S. was at only 47.3 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
How Employees Will Connect
As working from home is here to stay, employers are looking for new ways to incorporate collaboration and teamwork into the new normal. Around half of U.S. executives are looking to invest in conference rooms with enhanced virtual connectivity (57 percent), communal space in the office (48 percent), and unassigned seating (45 percent). The number one purpose of the workplace now, according to employees, is collaboration.
This article originally appeared in the February/March 2024 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.