This is a guest post from Angelo Castelda, a freelance writer from Asia. Besides writing, he also spends his time traveling and learning about diverse cultures, which opened his heart more to learning and imparting knowledge about homebased online jobs and TESL.
Working outside of an office is now a popular option for many industries. Because of the pandemic, it became even more popular because it’s a much safer choice than having employees travel to their places of work. Even now, when most countries are on their roads to recover from the pandemic’s impact, human resource experts and stakeholders forecast that remote work is here to stay.
While it has its disadvantages, just like any work setup, its advantages are much more appealing. For entrepreneurs, it lowers overall business costs and reduces short-term absenteeism of employees due to sickness. On the other hand, employees get to enjoy location independence when choosing an employer and the savings of not traveling to work and paying for food regularly.
As it looks like it’s going to remain for a while, it’s only fitting to focus on what will happen moving forward. For both employers and employees, it’s important to stay updated on the future of working remotely. Let’s explore it in this article, starting with the remote work trends that will shape 2021.
Reshaping of HR practices
Since the shift to remote work happened, HR departments also had to shift their practices. And since remote work will go on, more HR specialists will be reviewing their usual approaches to see how they can change them for the better. They have to basically reform and invent a new worker experience to adapt to the new normal.
The focus will shift to making the virtual worker experience better this year. HR specialists should adjust in-person practices to be more acceptable in a virtual setup. Such methods include hiring, employee orientation, training, and termination.
Because of the popularity of online jobs worldwide, HR has to cultivate a good virtual relationship with employees. Besides communicating and connecting with employees, they’ll also focus on shortening clerical work because of the rising trend of paper digitalization for data collection and processing purposes.
Competition to attract talent between cities and states
Historically, states and cities compete to attract businesses to relocate to their area to provide more job opportunities for their citizens. Now, they’ll be competing to attract talent to relocate to their jurisdiction due to remote work breaking the boundaries of location.
Since remote work broke location boundaries, city governments will shift to promoting incentives of relocating to their jurisdiction for professionals. It’s a much more affordable method of increasing employment in their area rather than giving tax credits to companies to relocate. This competition will add to the appeal of remote work and relocation in a world where an employee’s residence isn’t tied to their place of work.
Urgency in upskilling
Upskilling means providing an employee with more advanced skills through additional education and training. The shift to remote work for the new normal led to the acceleration of the necessity of upskilling. This year, more businesses across different sectors will be busy with training and educating their remote employees to upskill.
According to recent statistics on remote work trends, at least 54% of a company’s staff will require significant reskilling by 2022. This will prompt managers to create a shift away from specifying roles toward needed skills for a company. Changes of such magnitude will entail crafting new skills to help employees respond to them better.
This year, employees will be trained and educated by their companies to gain cross-functional knowledge. Businesses will also be quicker in adopting upskilling programs to help their workforce gain essential skills.
In conclusion
Businesses that’ll go on with remote work will have to humanize and work on improving the skill sets of their employees. More people will also benefit from working from home because of the incentives from different locales for relocation. The year 2021 looks to be an even better year for remote workers and people seeking remote job opportunities as the world adapts to it being the new norm.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
