Remote Working is the New Swing- With Many Issues

My first ever professional role as a Strategic Marketer, I was involved in working with a start-up in order to aid their communication and business development. This role involved having to work hand-in-hand with the CEO and to advice/act on different communication gateways such as social media posts and website designs.

As soon as the COVID-19 virus emerged, I was totally befuddled and had no idea how I was going to work without the aid of my manager and the team. Such a situation is probably quite preordained for most companies, as employees are using applications such as Zoom, Skype and Discord to collaborate with each other.

These applications offer features that allow companies to run meetings and share work with each other quickly. I, myself had to go into certain meetings to share work and highlight ideas with my co-workers on the conference call.

There is a popular belief amongst employees, that companies might move to remote working in the future due to how much more efficient it is. Companies are saving a lot more money by working from home because of the lack of need to pay rent for office space.

Many companies are spending on average around £650-£1500 per month on office space in London, these are large expenditures that could be cut down on. The money could instead go towards projects or increasing employee salaries.

However, there are some major downsides because not every industry is able to work from home. For example, the entertainment, travel, and other sectors that are almost close to being dysfunctional at the moment.

Whilst a lot of software companies are able to survive through online platforms, there are also many that do not function in a way in which remote working could work. This could potentially increase their chances of catching the virus.

Not only is this a recurring issue with workers, but this is also the case with students. Due to the current climate effecting everyone from those who are taking their GCSE’s to Postgraduate students, as they are in a tough situation where they are unable to do their exams but also need to get their qualifications.

Students have also been using communication software in order to learn, yet there have not been any viable solutions as to how they are going to have to do their examinations. The most convenient solution for now is for institutes to use the student’s predicted grades as their final grades.

This, of course comes with a few complications – the most common issue being that there are students who relied on the final exams to get their grades, so they did not give their best try on the mock exams to get good enough predicted grades.

The Department for Education is coming up with ways to solve this issue, but time is quickly running out and summer is almost approaching. In the end, there are both conveniences and many inconveniences to working from home due to this virus, but it is important to keep communication active.

This way, both the workers and students can stay posted on what is going on with their companies or institutions, respectively.

By Siva Raghuraman