“Be careful what you wish for ….”
Over the last number of months, quite a number of us have been working from home as our Offices/Place of Work have been closed.
In August we carried out a ‘Working from Home’ survey and, for me, one of the takeaway findings in this was that more people would be keen to seek more opportunities to work from home in the future. In addition to our own survey, I have been reading a growing amount of commentary suggesting that ‘Working from Home’ on a full time basis will be the future of work.
This finding resonated with me because of a conversation I had in July with a Director of HR within a large Multi-national organisation. One of the key concerns she outlined was that, if quite a number of positions could be effectively operated remotely (ie from home) without the necessity to be based in an office located in Dublin/Limerick/Shannon/Cork in order to perform the role, then there could be a focus to relocate some/all of these roles to a lower cost location?
Needless to say, for tax reasons there will always need to be employees based in Ireland, but maybe not as many as are currently employed?
So while the popular trend is to suggest the full time ‘Work from Home’ scenario is potentially the new normal …. we should be mindful of the various implications this may have.