On today’s Business Beat, Jeff talks about the results of a new survey from Microsoft on how working from home has changed businesses.
Tune in to the Business Beat, below, to learn more about the the survey findings on the impact of working from home on small businesses:
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Good morning, Paul!
What happens when over 60,000 Microsoft employees are forced to work from home because of a pandemic? Well, it took a pandemic for us to begin to understand what happens. And Microsoft just came out with a large-scale study that begins to provide some important insights. The purpose of the study was designed to estimate the effects of firmwide remote work on collaboration and communication. Microsoft summary of the study results are as follows:
“Our study shows that firm-wide remote work caused the important aspect of collaboration to become more static and siloed with fewer bridges between disparate parts of our teams. And it’s these effects that may make it harder for employees to acquire and share new information and ideas across the team. Now before the COVID 19 pandemic, at most, 5% of Americans worked from home for more than three days per week.
“Whereas it is estimated that by April of 2020, as many as 40% of Americans were working from home, full-time. Thus, in a matter of weeks, the pandemic caused about one-third of us workers to shift, to work from home in nearly every American that was able to did work from home.”
Now look, here’s the thing, trying to run a company, especially a small business where a lot of innovation and revolutionary ideas are born and introduced into the market, without effective communication, you simply can’t have exciting and dynamic creative ideas emerging from team interactions and without new ideas, small businesses and startups will be hard-pressed to find a relevant spot in the business ecosystem.
So what to do? Well, I believe that companies big and small must continue to search for an experiment with hybrid models that still provide for in-person collaboration and interaction and yet still allows for work from home as part of the mix as well. I actually believe that these emerging hybrid models could represent some of the best models of all, leading to high levels of productivity and even inspiring the kind of new ideas that small businesses must achieve.
I’m Jeff Sloan, founder and CEO of startupnation.com, and that’s today’s Business Beat on the Great Voice of the Great Lakes, WJR.
