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The remote working culture had a boost in last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. But it was a business model which has been transforming work for a while. With the boost, it gains due to the pandemic situation it shows the results of how the companies carried out their business without any downfalls and how productive it was. Around the world, over 50% of the companies are now practising working from home and employees are willing to join for companies who are practising working from home culture. Transforming the old business model to virtual workplace takes some time, but it comes with a certain set of benefits which will help organisations to grow.

In 2020 most of the companies transformed their workplace to virtual workplace because of the global pandemic. Graduations, weddings, travelling and all the other events has been cancelled because of the deadly virus. Because of the social distancing and other strict health guidelines, most of the people are now desperate for normalcy again, but there are still dark sides in the post COVID situation. Some regions and even countries are experiencing increasing trends of cases and some are not. Therefore, governments cannot take a proper decision to make attempts to reopen. Since this is not the first pandemic situation that the world is facing, still we cannot predict the outcomes because we are still in the middle stage of the pandemic. But this pandemic will change most of the business models, buying patterns and behaviours. As an example, now E-commerce platforms are gaining faster growth than the traditional way of selling after the pandemic. Therefore, with the ‘New Normal’ situation, HR departments also need to make certain changes to their HR policies and activities to keep their workforce motivated and connected to carry out the business as usual.

In this fast-moving era, it is hard for organisations to improve employee retention because there is a vast number of employment opportunities are available in the job market. Not like baby boomers and Gen Z, Millennials tend to shift jobs until they find a suitable job which fits their passion. Recent surveys found that 64% of the employees may leave their jobs by end of 2020, because of lack of satisfaction towards their current job role. When considering HR benefits most of the current employees are referring to training and development opportunities and it ranks among most wanted employee benefits. According to recent studies, 94% of the employees would stay with the company longer if there was an investment in learning. Therefore, learning and development can be identified as a crucial factor in positive company culture. Having a well-customised learning and development program will help organisations to showcase their commitment to the workforce. Also having a good corporate reputation regarding learning and development will help organisations to attract and retain their employees easily and they will end up having a massive and quality talent pool around them.

After the pandemic majority of the workforce is started working remotely in their virtual workplace. But at the begging, it was very hard for most of the employees to continue working in a virtual workplace because of loneliness and unexpected barriers which came across while working from home. The major challenge for organisations is to protect employees’ mental and physical health because this will directly impact on organisations remote work productivity. Most of the organisations had issues with maintaining employee wellness and they have come up with realistic solutions to overcome those problems. Currently, 60% of the world’s workforce is working remotely and 59% of the US workers prefer continuing remote working after Covid-19. This will have a direct impact on employee work-life balance and organisations need to initiate sustainable processors to maintain a perfect work-life balance and continue helping their employees to improve wellbeing. Here are some initiatives which can be used to improve remote workers’ wellbeing.