How COVID-19 Has Changed the Landscape of Work

It’s fair to say that COVID-19 had a significant impact on the way everyone lived and worked in 2020. The myriad ways in which it shifted our working methods and how it will continue to do so in the future, however, is a little less clear.

So, we asked our vast LinkedIn network to help us better understand how the pandemic has affected them – their moods, their schedules, and their strategy going forward.

Employers

While the long-terms effects of COVID on businesses is still unclear, we asked employers how they have fared so far. Here is what they had to say:



Many of our respondents agree that the pandemic has accelerated the normalization of remote work. This means that many employees will see an improvement in work-life balance and more opportunities will be available to workers who are not able to perform in a traditional office setting.

We can also see that nearly half of respondents continued hiring in the face of uncertainty and more than half performed better than expected through the pandemic. While this is good news, it is worth nothing that only 13% of businesses had accurate projections. Bearing in mind that this was a completely unpredictable phenomena, businesses may want to reevaluate their projection models and explore any room for improvement.

Remote Work

COVID-19 forced many people to work from home for the first time. It was a concern for some at first, but how have people settled into it? This is what our network had to say:
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Nearly three quarters of those we surveyed said that their job can be done fully at home, while over two thirds said this practice came naturally to them. This likely part of the reason so many employers thins that remote work will become more standard going forward.

There are still some people struggling with remote work, however. When we surveyed these respondents, a small number were still struggling to work from home and more than double that amount were experiencing low morale. This low morale does not necessarily coincide with the fact that these people are working from home, though. This will become interesting when we look at the morale of on-site workers.

On-Site Work

Not everyone had the opportunity to work remotely during the height of the pandemic. For essential workers and those who had to continue to work on-site, we found the following:



Let’s first look at that morale statistic. Over one quarter of on-site workers in our network reported low morale. This is ten percentage points higher than the same statistic about remote workers, which does make sense. While remote workers may feel isolated or had to deal with the learning curve of working from home, on-site workers had different concerns.

Only about one third of those we surveyed were satisfied with safety measures their employers have put in place. Bear in mind that over half of our respondents have worked through the entire pandemic so far, so that anxiety around safety has likely been taking a toll.

We also learned that over one third of our on-site network was still waiting to return to work at the time of this survey, which could also contribute to the low morale statistic.

While these learnings may mean something different for each industry, business, employer, and manager, having this kind of information is key as we continue to navigate COVID-19 and its effects. If you’d like to discuss our findings further, or need help hiring in this climate, please reach out to our team today. You can also browse our advice section for more insights.