As we settled into pandemic life, we blogged about the future being flexible. At that time, we could see the shift happening and we put a stake in the ground that at TechComms we would continue to embrace flexibility as part of our culture. While we proved we could all work efficiently and effectively from home, we’re happy to have the best of both worlds with our hybrid approach. We come to the office once a week and we work from anywhere we would like the other days. This has greatly improved our work-life balance and we’re grateful to our entire team for their commitment to providing our clients with a great experience no matter where we’re working from.
But, to be honest, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns. The fact is, and this is true of anything, remote working does require effort to make it successful. We learned this quickly as we experienced technical challenges, “Zoom fatigue,” and blurred the lines between home life and work. We’re still working on the right balance between in-office and work from home, but we’re committed to staying on the path.
We’re happy to see that the UK is considering making flexibility a legal right similar to what the Netherlands has before their Senate for approval. This would protect all of us and ensure fair and equal treatment whether we work in the office or from somewhere else.
We’re also closely watching the rise of augmented reality enhanced video conferencing, which we discussed in our blog post here. As wonderful as it is to work from home, we are challenged with video overload and miss the nuances of in-person collaboration, especially the benefit of reading body language. With new AR video conferencing solutions, we could get closer to the look/feel of in-person meetings as they are designed to create a more authentic experience with human gestures and supercharged collaboration tools.
Technology is advancing to support remote working even more. Case in point: Zoom has recently announced that they will expand beyond video conferencing to become a full remote working platform to compete with rivals Microsoft Teams, Google, and Slack.
Remote working has also become more than a perk to help with recruitment. It has opened up the workplace to invite more diversity now that we don’t have to necessarily live in a specific geo to be part of a team. It has also given us more time to focus on our well-being with the end of long commutes to the office five days a week. The pandemic challenged us in many ways, but there is good that has come from it. Increased flexibility to better balance work-life has been a welcome change for our team. We’re more creative, refreshed, focused, and productive. And, we’re ready to help you with a strategic approach to b2b tech pr. Contact us on + 44 (0) 203 322 8928.
