China was the first nation to be affected by and make a full recovery from COVID-19 in early 2020. Workplace staff eventually stopped working from home and went back to the office in late spring of 2020, after a temporary lockdown and rigorous rules. China slowly started going back to work, and their cities reopened, while the rest of the globe was still coping with the epidemic in different ways. Cases of COVID have been at historic lows for almost a year now. Now that the country’s workplaces are once again accessible to its citizens, the rest of the globe may learn from the Chinese employees’ firsthand accounts of what it’s like to navigate a hybrid workplace.
It’s remarkable how little has changed in the way we see remote work since before the COVID era.
While most executives acknowledge that working remotely improves productivity, the majority express worries about the practice’s impact on development opportunities and team morale. In fact, this kind of employment is nothing new for employees in China. Even in 2016, when we conducted our final study before the epidemic, there was a great deal of worker mobility in China. The typical Chinese worker now spends three days in the office and one or two days working remotely; nevertheless, while working remotely, they are more likely to visit a coworking space, alternative office location, café/third place, or client site than they are to work from home.
Due to the resumption of business travel and the reopening of Chinese cities, more people are now able to work from home throughout the week. Four out of five employees in China say they have some say over where they spend their workweek, with that percentage dropping to 63% for those who are not managers or higher up in the organization. Individual and group output, job satisfaction, creativity, and the capacity to solve issues all improve when workers are given some control over their work environment, whether that be in or out of the office. We found that the most creative businesses in 2016 gave their employees greater freedom of choice, allowed 26% of their workforce to work remotely (equivalent to 3.5 days out of the office), and encouraged employees to spend more time away from their workstations. Working remotely entails more than simply being at home. Remote work from other office locations, coworking sites, vacation, and third places will entice even full-time in-office personnel back out of the office once again when cities in other nations begin to open again.
In the end, I believe that the lessons we can learn from China will help usher in a golden age of work and the workplace. As a result of the shifting dynamics we’ve witnessed over the past year, we should (in theory) soon have a global workforce with greater flexibility in when and how to work than ever before. However, most workers will still want and choose the office as their primary work location, in part because of the positive effects it has on productivity and the social connections and sense of community it provides that simply can’t be replicated when working from home.
We can continue to progress with an enlightened perspective on work and a fresh emphasis on people and how they function best if we seize the opportunity presented by businesses’ forward-looking stances and reimagine the role of the office in light of these realities. The workplace is more critical than ever. Let’s make it worthwhile for workers to come into work by improving their working conditions.