Right now, you need reading material more than ever, and our best blogs for April post includes a lot of good stuff, including stories on the productivity of remote workers, the biggest IT challenges associated with COVID-19 and glimmers of an initial recovery.
Productivity in the Suddenly-Remote Work Era
The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly hurtled hundreds of thousands of people into remote work situations, and yet the negative impacts on productivity have been largely negligible, according to a new study from Salesforce Research.
With working conditions for the average professional suddenly looking very different, Salesforce has conducted a study to find out about changing expectations and shifting work habits. The Salesforce research team found remote work has only resulted in a 1 percent drop in productivity. Researchers also found that more than 40 percent of professionals would prefer to continue working remotely.
In the Salesforce survey, 61 percent of respondents said are working from home and 53 percent said they started remote work due to COVID-19. Respondents also reported an overwhelmingly positive experience, with 86 percent saying their productivity was either excellent or good and 81 percent saying they had good or excellent communication with their coworkers.
The Salesforce study also looked at what employees want in a remote work arrangement. Trust from employers, regular communication, schedule flexibility and location flexibility were all rated as very important by a majority of respondents.
IT Challenges Triggered by COVID-19
The business world has been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic, and a lot of the heavy lifting in recent weeks has been done by are good friends in the IT community.
IT professionals have faced a lot of new challenges in light of the pandemic and shut down, from helping people navigate remote work setups to managing heavy server loads.
Companies have been forced to move a lot of their processes online. This not only requires new infrastructure; it also requires employee training. Furthermore, almost every employee’s work-from-home situation is different. Some people have high-speed Internet connections that are capable of handling video conferencing platforms, and others don’t. some people use Apple products and some people use PCs. some are trying to do work on tablets and others are looking for access through their phones.
IT professionals have been given the unenviable task of finding solutions for all of these problems.
Have We Passed Rock Bottom?
In addition to creating a public health crisis, COVID-19 has unleashed an economic crisis that is being compared not to the Great Recession, but to the Great Depression.
However, as states start reopening for business, data from April is showing that the worst of the financial crisis may be behind us. The US economy crashed spectacularly in March, but more recent data has shown signs of stabilization and even improvement.
While it’s still too early to breakout the freshly-delivered champagne, business experts are sounding cautiously optimistic.
