Five years after the pandemic, is remote working still viable?

Remote working, which became a necessity during the Covid-19 pandemic, still continutes to prevail in many companies even five years later, while some have switched to a hybrid model, and others have done away with it altogether.

Working - or not working - from home has become a hot topic in the corporate world. According to a report in The Economist, bosses, by and large, claim that having people in the office is a cultural boon. The spontaneity that often leads to new ideas is lost when staff work from home. Collaboration suffers, too.

A study of 61,000 Microsoft employees back in 2021 found that remote working in the first half of 2020 made the tech giant more “siloed” and less “dynamic”. It is also harder to integrate new staff.

Yet virtually all employees say they would prefer to do at least some work at home and companies need to remain flexible to these needs.

Whether remote working is feasible depends on many things, such as corporate culture - which varies from country to country depending upon native laws, traditions, respect for privacy, personal accommodation, merit and above all structured promotion and award mechanism.

In the case of Pakistan, many firms maintain a traditionalist approach, not allowing their employees to work from home even in their difficult times thus adding to their stress and productivity.

Economic strategist and regional expert Dr Mehmoodul Hassan Khan told Business Recorder “corporate companies need swiftness, efficiency, joint work and timely execution of a certain assignment or project because every individual and section is equally interrelated and interdependent.”

Remote working only works if discipline, team-work, information sharing and the nature of work is not compromised.

He also believes the Pakistani banking industry’s HR policies, in particular, need a major overhaul. Industry bosses rarely allow work from home even if the need is genuine, he said.

Bosses in banking and other sectors are treated as supreme leaders who have their own criteria of transfers/postings, promotion, rewards and sanctions of leaves which often leads to a downfall in productivity and morale, he added.

In some cases, companies are more accomodating towards women’s request to work from home, given the societal assumption that they have to juggle home life with work. But firms must judge the discipline, punctuality, productivity and participation of all employees equally.

Another model is the 4-day work week. In 2022, Belgium passed a law allowing workers to compress their full work hours into four longer weekdays with full pay. Employers can still refuse but must do so in writing with justification

Germany conducted a six‑month pilot in 2023–2024 involving around 41–45 companies exploring shorter weeks with full pay; with 73% saying they planned to continue the model.

Many other European countries, as well as South Africa, Brazil, the UK and the US have had similar trials with positive outcomes which brings one to the conclusion that employee wellbeing should be prioritised, and productivity will follow.