As covid rates are relatively low, companies are increasingly calling their employees back to the office. However, even with being back in the workplace, the technologies adopted during remote work are here to stay. According to Bloomberg article: “Employees Are Returning to the Office, Just to Sit on Zoom Calls”, executives are incentivizing employees to return to the office, citing workplace culture and collaboration as reasons. Nonetheless, in-person communication continues to be very limited, as Zoom and Slack remain the primary collaboration tools for employees, regardless of where they work.
Simultaneously, most employees show a strong preference to continue working remotely. Based on Advanced Workplace Associates’ survey, just 3% of white-collar employees prefer to work in the office five days a week, and 86% want to work from home at least two days a week. Many executives recognize employees' preferences for a remote work environment and are searching for new ways to establish accountability in an online workplace. Andrew Mawson, managing director of AWA, is among the group of executives who is establishing employees’ preference for remote work and adaptable schedules. He states that “Employers have to realize that the genie is out of the bottle,” “Workers have seen that flexibility can work and bosses who are not sensitive to their employees’ needs will suffer accordingly.” The possibility of remote work establishing permanence nudges employers to search for reliable technologies that monitor and analyze employee productivity.
As we move away from the norm of teams working together at the same physical location, the way in which supervisors measure the productivity of their employees is also changing. Workforce analytics and productivity insights are now generated with the incorporation of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing technologies.
MENTOR Global Consultants have launched a new productivity initiative under MENTORPerforma™, where we provide productivity intelligence technology and consulting services in portraying a data-oriented understanding of employee engagement and productivity.