By Tereza Urbankova, Global Media Relations Senior Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim and EACD Board member, reflects on the challenges and opportunities of remote work.

“We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine work and productivity.”

This quote by Arianna Huffington, the founder and CEO of Thrive, aptly describes the potential the current times offer for many work environments. It’s been over two years since the workplace was upended overnight and this statement made me reflect on that time, on working from home almost 100% but also feeling privileged to be able to do so considering many people and businesses that negatively suffered the consequences of COVID. And after about three rounds of trying to get workers back to an office setting, this time it looks real. The dominant style of work appears to be the hybrid model in which people are asked to spend two or three days a week at their office and the rest of the time work from home or wherever they so choose.

Yes, ‘a choice’ is an important word in this scenario as some companies also try to shift back to in-office working as confirmed through a survey by Totaljobs revealing that 1.3 million Londoners say they would rather quit their job than commute to work.

On the other hand, there are also studies reporting ‘negative perceptions’ of the work-from-home trend. In one conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management about 62% managers claim that “full-time remote work is detrimental to employees’ career objectives” and 72% say they would “prefer all of their subordinates to be working in the office”. In addition, some workers also voice their concerns about not going back to the office, feeling it could diminish networking opportunities, cause work relationships to suffer and require them to work more hours.

There are different views out there on what the best way of working now is, and some businesses are still looking at the future through the lens of the organisations design principles of the past. As an example, Tesla’s Elon Musk has told his employees they must work a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office claiming that remote work simply can’t be as effective or as productive as working from a physical location.

A different approach has been trialled by Google: Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see a pay cut if they decide to work from home permanently with the long commuters being hit the hardest. It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley which often sets trends for other large employers, so it naturally raises uncertainty among employees as well as broader concerns.

Despite companies taking various approaches to adapt to the ‘new or next reality’, it is clear that many people want to have the freedom to decide from where they wish to work (if their work can be performed from elsewhere) and see the benefits a balance between working from home and commuting can bring. The challenge is to find the best way but also to address information security challenges that remote working may pose as this article explores.

There are a few things employers can do to help their employees transition yet again to this new reality, perhaps the most critical is listening to them, to what they prefer to ensure the company brings the best out of them. Five-day mandatory in-office workweeks are likely now a deal breaker for many. In addition, employers should look at the work environment and see how to make it better; they can even strive to recreate what their employees love about working from home while eliminating the stressors of the home environment.

But as the introductory quote says, we now have a truly great opportunity: companies can reinvent the workspace in a way that has the potential to boost creativity, teamwork and employee satisfaction, as well as to meet the needs of the next generation.