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Apple, another tech company you won’t need a description for, is offering lots of flexibility with work from home.The main virtual work position at Apple available in the UK is an at Home Advisor, part of the Apple Support team. If you enjoy talking on the phone and offering customer and technical support then this could be a good option for you. If customer service isn’t really your cup of tea, job opportunities are always coming up so keep an eye on their website. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to linger, several benefits of remote work have come to the fore. As a result, many tech giants, including Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft, have told their employees that they may be able to work from home permanently. For example, we can chat, send documents and links, start video chats, and open up topics or task-based group channels to exchange information more effectively in teams without having to spend hours in meetings. Slack also has many integrations with tools that let you receive information right in the flow-of-work — I can set up calendar appointments, lead notifications, all within Slack.
- “A recent survey of Bank staff showed that the majority hope to work from home at least two days per week”, she said.
- Kate Diver, the company’s Head of People Risk, Workplace and Expansions, outlined the strategy in ablog post, whereby employees can work from anywhere in the world for 90 days per year.
- But as the pandemic took hold, these methods of employee engagement simply weren’t possible anymore.
- Before the pandemic, our workforce was spread across our centralised head office locations, as well as smaller satellite locations and home work sites.
- However, Gorman recognised that some employees might not be able to get vaccinated, so the bank will continue to consider employees’ returns on a case-by-case basis.
Without the need for people to be in the office every day, we are widening the talent pool, helping drive diversity and inclusion and meeting the needs of job seekers who are looking for opportunities with greater flexibility. In fact, recent research by McKinsey found that 67% of organisations with remote working in place saw a rise in productivity, customer satisfaction, employee engagement and diversity and inclusion. Leaders must decide how to interact with remote employees effectively, without undermining productivity. At Vodafone Business, we’re working with our teams to agree what this will look like for us. The key is to build in flexibility, so it can be adapted for individual or team’s needs, but it must be a give and take, trust-based arrangement.
Hybrid
But pressing pause may only postpone the fallout from employees who have grown used to the perks of remote work. These companies have adopted either remote-first or trust-based approaches that see employees working from home full-time or choosing when, and how, they join their team in the office. More than a quarter of the 700 executives surveyed expect their organisations to be fully flexible, with individual members of staff allowed to choose their working patterns. A further 39 per cent intend to shift to between one and four days of remote working per week, the institute said. This doesn’t come as a surprise—Deloitte has promoted flexible working in its policies since 2014, but less than half of its workforce worked from home regularly before the pandemic. The auditing giant said the pandemic had accelerated its hybrid working model, as 96% of its employees wanted the freedom to choose how they worked in the future—a statistic that you just can’t ignore. Another finance giant opting for a relaxed, hybrid approach is UBS—Switzerland’s biggest bank.
“Employees will be allowed to work up to three days per week from home,” says Evan. Irwin Mitchell provide legal and financial advice from 15 locations in the UK. The full-service law firm can advise on any legal issue across all areas of personal and commercial law. During the pandemic, the company surveyed its workforce and found most supported a hybrid working model with some time spent at home and some in the office. As lockdown conditions eased, Irwin Mitchell announced a new Flexible by Choice policy, allowing employees, where appropriate, to make the decision about where to work.
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With this shift occurring in employees and leaders, it seems almost certain that parts of the great remote work experiment will pervade permanently into our work practices. In February 2021, Revolut announced its plans to move its 2000 employees to a permanent remote working model. “Once countries start to permanently remote companies lift travel restrictions or slowly move away from lockdowns, after over a year behind closed doors, we believe this new policy will be a huge success”, says Jim MacDougall, the company’s VP of People. Just 6-months into the pandemic,Redditannounced that it’d switch to a hybrid workplace model permanently.
But unlike previous announcements, the company did not set a new return date and says it will wait until the new year to assess when U.S. offices can fully reopen. But Peter Laurin, Head of Managed Services at Ericsson, is very clear that the current plan is not to reduce office space.