- The latest remote work trend: Fear of being laid off and struggling to find a job
Fifty-nine percent of American workers are not concerned they or someone in their household will lose a job in the next few months, according to a new survey of the labor force from CNBC and Momentive. And even more (80%) are confident they would find a new job in six months or less if they lost one today.
Remote workers are less confident in their ability to find a new job quickly, according to the CNBC|Momentive Workforce Survey for Q4 2022. Specifically, 24% of those working remotely say they could find a new job in one month if they lost their current job, versus 41% of fully in-office workers who say the same. And 24% of those working remotely say it could take more than six months to find a new job, versus 16% of fully in-office workers.
“Remote workers are the most fearful of layoffs, because they know they have had a sweet deal: they may have suffered through the early dysfunction of Covid, but they’ve since reaped the benefits and relative autonomy created by working from home. That power dynamic will naturally swing back to employers if the economy weakens,” said Laura Wronski, senior manager of research science at Momentive
Overall, the survey finds worker morale higher now than at any point in the past three years. Nearly three-quarters of workers (72%) say morale is “excellent” or “good” at their workplace right now, up from 64% year over year. Morale is even higher for younger workers, but according to Momentive “morale is up among nearly all workers regardless of gender, race or job level.”
Source: CNBC
2. How To Navigate Remote Entrepreneurship And Create A Better Business
Zach Boyette is the cofounder and Managing Partner of Galactic Fed, a fully remote growth marketing agency with staff in over 17 countries.
Remote entrepreneurs can bring benefits to their businesses.
At first glance, the benefits of remote entrepreneurship seem obvious: no physical office, less overhead and zero time spent commuting. But I’ve found the potential positive outcomes for your business itself are more far-reaching than you might think.
Consider recruiting, for example. You can hire top talent from anywhere in the world. This approach to hiring proved true when we returned from our three-month journey to find our international agency operating as usual. Coming back and seeing that everything was just fine was really rewarding. My team knows how to do their jobs and handle things without the founders around.
Furthermore, necessity breeds innovation. I believe the result of traveling and operating remotely while running a company forces entrepreneurs to have impeccable time management and can expose them to other cultures. In my experience, it opens your mind to new work and management philosophies and can help you learn to go with the flow and take things more naturally, a skill I believe many entrepreneurs lack.
On top of that, I’ve found that broadening your cultural horizons can lead to a more diverse team and inclusive culture. That same diversity shines through when you travel, especially if you have to work through various issues in a multicultural setting and learn to empathize with other viewpoints. Ultimately, I believe in making your company a reflection of the world you see around you. This can foster an environment of acceptance where people want to work. You might also find this helps lower turnover and makes room for lifelong careers.
The new future of work is here
Remote work is often referred to as “the future of work,” but, as we know, it has now become relatively mainstream. I believe we’re on the cusp of a new future of work. What does that look like? I predict the future of work will be primarily asynchronous, global organizations. We will see people moving away from cities and into other areas to be closer to family, to be near nature or to live in a new country. As time passes, the term “digital nomad” or even “remote work” might even seem antiquated because I expect traveling and working will be a normal facet of life.
Source: Forbes
3. 13 CEE Startups That Support Us To Work From Anywhere
Remote work has taken an upturn of 44% in the past ten years, with around 75% of all employees worldwide believing that working remotely is the future and should be considered normal. And more and more countries are starting to adopt regulations about working from home to aid HRs and companies in managing the shift. This huge transition is enhanced by many solutions helping teams to communicate asynchronously and be even more productive and efficient.
The Recursive has prepared a list of 15 startups from CEE that are making the life of hybrid and remote workers easier or are helping companies adjust their office spaces to their new roles within the working processes.
Startups that help transform the office spaces
- Yarooms
Yarooms is a hybrid workplace software suite, which consists of room booking, desk booking, work planning, digital signage, and visitor management solutions that are fitted for all business needs.
- Pluria
Pluria’s work-from-anywhere solution allows companies and their employees to access office spaces or meeting rooms on demand and save resources by paying only when they actually use the space. Their subscription-based mobile app helps companies recruit teams, expand their businesses between borders and adjust to a more flexible way of working.
- OfficeRnD
Office RnD is a coworking and community management software that automates administrative processes. It was founded in 2015 in Sofia to provide a flexible service to office spaces and businesses and help them scale their operations. Today it serves more than 2000 working spaces in over 60 countries and has employees on 3 different continents. The company also enables people that have chosen to work in shared spaces to access all the services offered by the venue and keep track of their membership plan.
- SpotUS.space
SpotUs Space has committed to bringing complete digital interaction between the office building and their tenant companies, in relation to tenant employees and visitors. It is a self-service mobile app for parking or reservation of office desks, offering digital access to the workplace.
- BOX2M
BOX2M’s solution is a SaaS and industrial IoT tool, both hardware, and software, for office buildings to decrease energy and utility bills and maintenance costs.
- Cowork7/24
Cowork7/24 is a company that offers access to digital nomads, remotely working professionals, and traveling people to the most suitable coworking space among 261 flexible offices on two continents.
- Bright Spaces
Bright Spaces’ solution is an interactive platform for clients to showcase office spaces digitally, aided by three design templates.
- Native Teams
Native Teams offers a plan-based approach to contractors, remote workers, their employees, and clients based on individual needs. Some of the features include sending or requesting payments, looking for employed status and client payments services, paying international freelancers and flexible workers, and managing employment and payments to employees.
- Motion Software
Motion software was founded in 2015, and it allows its employees to work completely remotely. It essentially makes them like freelancers, but gives them a sense of security, by being full-time employees.
- LucidLink
Founded in 2016, LucidLink provides its users with fast and secure remote access to large files and datasets that perform like a local disk. The SaaS solution of LucidLink allows remote work teams to have access to data across the globe, as an extension of their local drive.
- Panther
Panther is an all-in-one platform that employs and pays global teams. They help companies with the difficult process of international hiring, payroll, benefits, and compliance, so companies can employ the best candidates around the world.
- Sessions
Sessions’ mission is to solve the problem of unproductive meetings and help teams communicate more effectively. Dan Lupu, a partner at Earlybird Digital Fund said: “Sessions offers a unified platform that can efficiently address the communication issues while providing an engaging experience. Their unique mechanic allows companies to digitally engage with their customers in fluid, meaningful interactions no matter the complexity.”
- XOR AI Recruiter
XOR AI Recruiter is a company that helps businesses with their talent acquisition processes. It uses AI and chatbots to make the recruitment process easier, and quicker and sort out the best blue-collar candidates. It specializes in manual labor, technical and operations segments of candidates.
Source: The Recursive
4. Marketing sector most open to remote working when recruiting new staff
Employers in the marketing sector are most open to remote working when recruiting new staff, according to new research from equity management platform, Vestd.
A report from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology revealed that around one in eight UK employees are working from home exclusively
Marketing took the top spot, with 13.52% of 15,720 job posts being advertised as working from home.
The marketing industry is ahead of other progressive sectors such as finance, HR, and recruitment in their readiness to employ remote workers.
Ifty Nasir, CEO of Vestd, explained the findings: “At Vestd, we were an early adopter and pioneer of remote working and have built our business processes and culture around our team permanently working from home. For us, it is a natural fit and the flexibility enables our team to benefit from a better work-life balance while still delivering on their workload.
Source: Business Leader
5. Will your remote job stay that way?
Rebecca Hann, University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business
In my latest research — co-authored with Smith PhD student Jingwen Yang, Charles Ham of Indiana University, and Wenfeng Wang of City University of Hong Kong — we looked at work-from-home job postings and found employers are more likely to offer remote work when more of their peers already do so.
Many people like the option to work from home. According to research, some employees are even willing to accept lower wages in exchange for workplace flexibility. Several employers such as Airbnb noted their career pages receive considerably more views when a job description includes the flexibility to work from home.
Even CEOs who are reluctant to offer work-from-home flexibility may be forced to if many of their competitors do. If not, they risk losing employees to those competitors or facing strong headwinds when attracting new talent.
Take note of competitors and the industry landscape. Some firms continue to embrace remote work (e.g., Airbnb, Amazon, Citigroup, and Facebook), while others prefer a return-to-office policy (e.g., Apple, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Tesla). Our research finds that employers are more likely to offer remote positions when they face greater competition from peers, especially in areas where employee demand for remote work is stronger. If many employers are offering remote work in the industry where you’re seeking a job, you can feel more confident the one you want will stay that way. But if most of the companies in that industry have called workers back into the office, there’s a risk that even jobs advertised as remote now could return to in-person in the future.
If the economy enters a recession and labor markets loosen, the bargaining power may return to the side of employers. Companies that reluctantly adopted work-from-home policies may reverse those even if their peers continue to offer remote work.
Face time with your boss and other colleagues still matters, especially when you’re new to a company. Some young workers worry remote work will affect their career growth. Even if you’re not in the office, make an effort to connect in person on occasion with your manager and co-workers.
Source: USA Today
6. Why Some Companies Are Still Fully Remote
A Gallup poll found that employees’ top-cited reasons for preferring remote work included “not having to commute, needing flexibility to balance work and personal obligations, and improved well-being (which likely results from having more time).”
At Xpedition, we’ve found that remote work has also made it easier for employees to explore more of the world and move closer to loved ones or better school districts. Now that our team can work from anywhere with just a laptop and a strong Wi-Fi connection, they can create their own customized workflows—whether that entails listening to music, working from a coffee shop or decorating a space that matches their personal design aesthetic. This allows them to produce their best work instead of adhering to a one-size-fits-all schedule or open office layout.
Returning to an office space that isn’t conducive to each individual’s needs will do more harm than good after your teams have experienced a better work-life rhythm. In fact, ADP Research Institute’s annual survey of 32,000 workers across 17 countries found that 64% would consider quitting if their job asked them to come back to the office full time. While no setup is perfect, I believe the flexibility of remote work makes it more sustainable for us to continue doing great work.
A Tracking Happiness study of over 12,000 individuals found that remote work increased employee happiness by up to 20%. Given this, it’s no surprise that 78% of Americans with jobs that can be done from home would prefer to continue working remotely.
Allowing our employees to live where they want to helps keep them happy and more engaged with their roles. For example, three of the people on our content marketing team have relocated to be closer to family or live in areas with lower tax burdens. Having the freedom to choose where to live has increased job satisfaction while also helping us retain great talent and valuable institutional knowledge.
Global Workplace Analytics found that businesses would save over $500 billion annually in real estate, electricity, absenteeism, turnover and productivity if employees worked from home at least half of the time. This would translate to a yearly savings of around $11,000 for each remote worker.
Source: Forbes
7. Airbnb launches one-stop hub for remote workers in Dubai
Airbnb today announced the launch of the Dubai remote working hub, a one-stop-shop for aspiring remote workers in partnership with Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism (DET). Anyone looking to live and work in Dubai can now use the hub to find inspiration for local long-term listings as well as helpful information on entry requirements and visa policies.
The Live and Work Anywhere programme will see Airbnb and Dubai’s Department of Economy and Tourism promote the city to remote workers seeking accommodation and guidance for their long-term stays.
Velma Corcoran, Regional Lead for Middle East & Africa at Airbnb said: “Dubai is a global leader in facilitating remote working. As this trend continues to accelerate, we want to work together to make it easier for people to enjoy the newfound flexibility to work and travel, and help the city harness the economic benefits of this new type of tourism.”
Millions of people are now more flexible about where they live and work. About one in five guests globally reported using Airbnb to work remotely while travelling in 2021 — a trend that has continued into Q1 2022, with long-term stays at an all-time high, more than doubling in size from Q1 2019.
Source: Airbnb
