HRM undergoes significant changes driven by the economy and its conditions as an essential component of modern organizations’ activities in managing employees. Furthermore, some factors that directly impact workers and their working conditions can also cause significant changes in an organization’s human resource management practices. The current trend for remote work initially appeared as a result of globalization expansion; however, the trend gained popularity during working under COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Despite its usefulness in helping organizations to continue working during the pandemic, the continuation of the remote work trend after the removal of social distancing restrictions raises questions among HR experts. This essay will explain the remote work trend, explore its effect on organizations, define how the trend affects HRM, and suggest how HRM can respond to this trend.
Firstly, despite the public opinion about remote work representing the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend began to gain popularity much earlier. The globalization processes marked the beginning of a new era where organizations operate and collaborate on an international scale. The technological progress provided employees with the opportunity to work from any location. As a result, the labor market expanded to fit candidates from other countries. Ideally, the trend could support the organization’s growth through cultural exchange, diversity, new perspectives on old problems, and creativity. However, it turned out that managing remote workers is more challenging and involves changing work processes for the whole team.
Furthermore, the experience of the pandemic has shown that not all industries and professions are ready to move to a remote workplace. While the pandemic emphasized the lack of resources and necessary protective equipment in healthcare systems, a similar situation was observed in remote working conditions. Many employees faced a lack of equipment for remote work, while others experienced challenges operating in remote conditions due to a lack of technical skills and computer literacy. For example, the study by König and Seifert (2020) determined that only 12% of adults aged 50 and older could work from home during the pandemic, and 15% combined worked at home and the workplace. The information emphasizes the fact that the management of the organization did not care about the development of their employees, which resulted in significant difficulties in organizing work in a remote work environment.
Next, comfortable working conditions present an important factor in employee job satisfaction. Moreover, HRM targets creating a safe and healthy workplace environment for all workers. During the pandemic, remote workers were forced to provide themselves with working equipment, with more than half of remote workers making additional purchases of equipment or furniture ranging from $100 to $499 in price (SHRM, 2021). In tech-oriented companies that have integrated remote work positions long before the pandemic, workers are compensated to create a home working station. For example, Shopify provides remote employees with $1,000 compensation for setting up their home office (Nova, 2020).
Other companies, such as Chegg, offer to pay their remote workers’ internet bills (Nova. 2020). Thus, the pandemic emphasized the gap in the readiness of organizations to transition to remote work compared to tech companies. Therefore, organizations need to acknowledge that it is impossible to transfer an employee to remote work without reviewing current HRM practices and creating comfortable working conditions.
Considering the trend’s effect on HRM, remote workers’ presence introduces significant workflow difficulties. Firstly, ensuring communication and eliminating inconsistencies between employees and superiors requires direct connection of all team members through voice and video calls. According to Martin (2020), remote workers attend more virtual meetings than on-site workers, which causes constant changes in their work schedules. Furthermore, although meetings can directly occupy a small part of working time, processing the information and transitioning back to the working mood can significantly reduce the remote worker’s productivity. In addition, many remote workers work in their spare time as they have more opportunities to organize their work. Thus, even though working longer hours significantly improves remote workers’ productivity, it negatively affects their mental state due to a lack of rest.
Next, the remote work trend significantly affects current HRM practices because it unintentionally divides workers into two types and positions, remote workers as less important employees. One of the primary principles of equality in HRM suggests that all employees must be treated equally and have the same opportunities. However, remote workers are often considered less important in organizations where teams consist of on-site and remote workers. For example, according to SHRM (2021), 42% of supervisors admitted that they forget to assign tasks to remote workers. Moreover, working in a certain position in a remote mode does not imply that the employee will be able to continue to work remotely if promoted to a higher position. Thus, remote workers have significantly fewer career opportunities.
Therefore, analyzing how remote work trend affects HRM defined that current HRM practices need improvements to prevent the infringement of the interests of remote workers in the future. Furthermore, most of the difficulties are related to the unpreparedness of organizations to switch to remote work and the prioritization of on-site employees in the organization of work processes. Thus, there are two prominent ways in which HRM can respond to the growing trend of remote work.
Firstly, organizations can fully integrate remote work as an alternative to on-site work. The response implies that all core employees will be able to choose between working in remote conditions or on-site. This response will eliminate the competition between two types of workers because workers will be able to switch between on-site and remote working and vice versa. While this organizational change will be challenging to implement, it can prepare organizations for similar emergencies to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On the other hand, many companies already chose the second way of fully transitioning to remote work. For example, Airbnb recently announced that the company implemented a work-from-anywhere policy which corresponds to the company’s mission in the development of short-term rental accommodation for tourists (Parsons, 2022). Similarly, mobility aggregator Lyft switched to fully flexible workplaces at the beginning of the year. The explanation for the change from Kristin Sverchek, Lyft’s President of Business Affairs, suggests that the company’s experience during the pandemic showed that hybrid models did not work (Sverchek, 2022).
Thus, in order to avoid overloading supervisors, it was more reasonable for Lyft to switch completely to remote work (Sverchek, 2022). Therefore, in cases where the first response option does not provide effective results, organizations can try to switch to remote work completely.
In conclusion, this essay explored how the current remote work trend affects HRM. Exploring the trend and its reasons defied that even though remote work has received much publicity during the pandemic, the initial reasons for the trend’s growing popularity are globalization and technological progress. Furthermore, the forced transition to remote work during the pandemic emphasized the lack of resources and management’s insufficient attention to developing employees’ technical skills, resulting in a decrease in employees’ satisfaction with work. The essay identified that the current use of remote work undermines the principles of equality and safe work environment in HRM because on-site employees are often prioritized over remote workers. Lastly, the essay proposed two main ways HRM can respond to the trend: switching to a hybrid organization model or fully transitioning to remote work.
References
König R, & Seifert A. (2022). Digitally savvy at the home office: Computer skills of older workers during the COVID-19 pandemic across Europe. Frontiers in Sociology, 7, 1-12. Web.
Martin, M. (2020). The 6 biggest downsides to remote work. HR Morning. Web.
Nova, A. (2020). Working from home? You might be able to expense a new desk. CNBC. Web.
Parsons, M. (2022). Airbnb’s new work-from-anywhere policy leaves you wondering — who’s next? Skift. Web.
SHRM. (2021). SHRM research reveals negative perceptions of remote work. Web.
Sverchek, K. (2022). Lyft announces fully flexible workplace. Lyft. Web.