By Niroshana De Silva
“Work-From-Anywhere” is an emerging form of remote work which offers geographic flexibility. So, it’s less commute. Anyone can work in the morning, work at night, ie at whatever time it suits you to complete your tasks.
With the flexibility to live and work “wherever” during this pandemic situation, it could be a town, city or a village that the employee prefers, or in some cases even able to work from another country. So it’s really about living and working from anywhere the worker prefers. This can be applied to every single employee including the CEO of any organisation.
From organisations’ point of view, work from anywhere has become a way, a mechanism to attract and retain the best talented people representing the new generation. If organisations do not offer work from “anywhere,” there’s a real risk of losing their best employees.
On the other side of the coin, early adopters of this model could attract a lot of talent who would not move to where organizations are located, because of transportation during this global pandemic situation, or because of difficulty in finding places to live, due to the rising cost of living, etc.
We are reasonably confident that there will be an increase in productivity when employees move out from the traditional work model to a “work from anywhere” model. But organisations need to have in place proper or adequate systems to facilitate employees when they adopt “work from anywhere” model.
When looking at what organizational transformation should happen to support “work from anywhere,” any of the senior management or a CEO will realize that the only things that need to be changed are the existing processes.
For example; how to communicate, how to share knowledge, how to socialize, how to measure productivity and how to manage data privacy and regulation? So, it is really an organizational transformation project.
Best thing we should learn is that with the new model every employee is able to believe that everybody shares the same organizational culture as never before.