Many companies are planning for ongoing change to their employment patterns even after the pandemic will finally be over, flexible working becomes more acceptable and common now.

Every fourth British employee could end up working from home for good, this is a companies plan for permanent changes after the Covid pandemic is over. Almost every CFO (chief financial officer) surveyed by Deloitte expects more flexible and remote working in the long term. With this to be expected to lead to a five fold increase in the number of all people clocking in from their spare room converted to the office, taking the share of remote workers up from only 5% back in 2019 to about 25% in 2025 which in my opinion is rather high number. In years to come this trend will be getting more and more popular and eventually we will see a permanent transition for more and more workers until it will become an expected normality.

Ian Stewart, chief economist at Deloitte while doing their survey noted that “By and large, this massive forced experiment in home-working has been very successful. Sectors have been able to maintain quite a high degree of effectiveness operating from home”.

This large scale shift is in position to boost the workforce enormously, opening up opportunities for those who have traditionally had fewer chances with a stricter five day patterns, disabled workers as well as older groups. This move would bring many benefits for those workers and the wider economy. Using less office space could produce significant savings for the businesses.

When talking about benefits and what’s good about it in general, there are also some downsides to working exclusively from home and shunning the office forever, this means it is more likely that offices could shift to a pattern where a large share of their staff work two or three days a week on site instead and this may actually affect productivity as our “body clock” would not be fully transitioned to this new remote work pattern.

At the same time Office for National Statistics found 16% of companies intend to use more home working as permanent part of their business model, led by the IT and communications industry in which more than a third said remote working was here to stay.

Demand for remote workers has been particularly high in IT and computing, nursing, medical and care roles as well as accounting and financial positions. Those seeking work in retail, hospitality and catering businesses would however face a sustained slump in demand.

Are you ready for a full work from home transition? Let us know in the comments section below.

All the best,
Lucas