Dive Brief:

• After a year of transition away from in-person worksites at many organizations, a majority of both executives and employees surveyed this month by PwC say that remote work shifts caused by COVID-19 have been successful at their organizations.
• Productivity may be a big factor behind future decisions to maintain remote work. Fifty-two percent of executives said that productivity improved during the prolonged work-from-home period, while 34% of employees said the same. But while more than half of workers wanted to work from home at least three days per week, 87% said the office is important for collaboration and building relationships.
• Executive respondents were also likely to perceive value in offices from a cultural perspective. Only 5% of executives said that employees did not need to be in the office in order for their organizations to maintain a strong culture. A plurality, 29%, said workers should be in the office at least three days per week in order to do so, while 21% said keeping a strong culture would require employees to be in the office five days per week.

Dive Insight:

The pandemic-driven shift to remote work will impact not only the schedules on which employees run, but also the tools with which they work.

In a previous PwC report published in December, the firm surveyed IT executives and found 65% expected at least a quarter of their organization's workforces to work from home permanently after the pandemic. Additionally, leading firms in the report said they invested in workflow automation tools as well as cloud-based collaboration tools, in part to support hybrid work models in which workers spend time working both in an office and at other locations.

[for the rest of HR Dive's analysis, please visit here]

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