Salesforce Research: Workers see a hybrid work/office future

Employees are starting to return to the office, either partially or fully depending on their unique situations, and as an MSP you might be seeing that happen with your customers. This begs the question what will going back to the office look like as we move through the pandemic?

Do employees, who may now be used to working at home, want to return to the office full time? Or, do they want to continue working from home? Perhaps they want to have a hybrid approach where they spend some time in the office and some working from home?

There’s much to think about, and as the de facto IT department, you have a stake in this. You have to think about what it means if work from home is permanent, and the impact that could have on your services and how you deliver them.

Salesforce Research, the research arm of the CRM giant, has been querying workers on a regular basis throughout the pandemic about attitudes on working from home. For some, it depended on the job, while for others depended on their age and whether they had young children at home. It’s a complex question and there are certainly no one-size-fits-all answers.

Survey says…

At the start of the pandemic, many employees found they liked being at home for the most part. But as it has worn on, people are finding they miss the camaraderie and the data suggests that attitudes about going back to the office have begun to shift a bit.

Still, the survey found that people do like the flexibility and the idea of a hybrid home/office work future appeals to many people. As Salesforce wrote in a post regarding recent findings, “Just 37% of our survey respondents view full-time remote work as the most appealing long-term scenario. In contrast, 64% want to spend at least some of their working hours at an office, store, factory, or other type of workplace.”

That home/office combination could present some management challenges for MSPs, but it’s entirely likely, you’ve been working to resolve many of the issues around having people work outside the office for some time now. The pandemic has only exacerbated that point.

As people return to the office in some form in the coming months, as an MSP you will have to sharpen your offering and provide the means to work seamlessly from wherever the employees happen to be. If the survey data is correct, that hybrid work style could be the new normal whenever we return to normal.

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