By Bashir Kabir
Remote work is a working style that allows professionals to work outside of a traditional office environment. Also termed virtual work, the advent of communication technology and internet, variety of work responsibilities can be carried out remotely.
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the remote work alternative has significantly become important in the effort to limit physics interaction that is believed to be the prime cause of the spread of the deadly virus.
This is not to say that there aren’t tons of challenges facing the remote style of work. However, a necessity is forcing the invention of ways to face these challenges which are surmountable in the first place.
The fragmented team communication is one of the setbacks of the remote or virtual work. In countries like Nigeria, the challenge goes beyond that. Erratic power supply, glitch in the internet service, and poor average digital skills among employees will make remote work even more challenging.
However, since organizations are identifying remote work with many advantages such as, low production/management cost, easier workforce management, increased production, lesser salaries and wages cost etc, the trend was already progressive and only reinforced with the pandemic outbreak.
On the employees’ side, remote work has advantages too. Better work-life balance, freedom, less expenditure due to commuting or fueling and feeding and so on. As an additional advantage, companies and organizations are more competitive in hiring because the best employees can easily be found on the internet anywhere in the world.
While it could be safe to assume that not all work responsibilities are suitable for remote work status, a very wide range of the office work can easily be done remotely. It is also not unexpected that a different approach to staff management policy is needed in the remote working context.
So, what does it take to work remotely? The most important besides having digital skills is a laptop, a reliable internet connectivity that can cater for high quality video conferencing and a solid messaging history. This could be your ordinary email where it can serve as your record as well as for reference. Other messaging tools such as WhatsApp can equally for used for on-the-go communication and instant notification.
The most feared consequence of the remote working is the possibility of many losing their jobs. That fear might just be true if the trend continues and particularly with COVID pandemic showing no sign of being done yet.
More than a mere workplace trend though, the concept of working from anywhere at any time is the future state of work. Technology is going to become more advanced and bring us all virtually ever closer together.
